Land Rights Reform and Governance in Africa Century?

United Nations Development Programme
Land Rights Reform and Governance in
Africa
How to make it work in the 21st Century?
Draft Discussion Paper
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Author: Liz Alden Wily, Independent Expert
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1
Abstract
The main argument of this paper is that insecurity of land tenure is a socio-political condition
that can be made – and unmade. Its origins lie in 19th and 20th century policies which failed to
accord indigenous and customary occupancy their deserved status as private property
interests. This has deprived millions of poor of the protection they need to withstand the
worst effects of social transformation and the commoditisation of land. Lands and resources
owned in common have been most affected, the more valuable having been withdrawn from
local custodianship or reallocated to outsiders and investors. Reforms of the 20th century
often improved the general access of poor to land but made customary rights less secure.
Entitlement programmes that converted customary occupancy into individualised Europeanderived tenure forms have widely extinguished secondary and common property interests.
In Africa (the focus of this paper) over 90 percent of the rural population gain access to land
by custom, and around 370 million of them are definably ‘poor’. With exceptions, customary
access to land has been no more than permissive and often remains so. People with
customary rights to land often live on land that is actually classified as government or public
land. While rights over farmland and houses are not routinely interfered with, common
property ownership of pastures, forests and woodlands see constant attrition through state
appropriation and reallocation to investors or interest-holders of its choice. Yet these lands
provide substantial support to livelihoods, especially of the poor who often have no or little
farmland. The lucrative and rising values of pasture, forest and woodland are still typically
captured by governments in the form of logging, agribusiness land leasing and other fees.
This deprives poor communities of a crucial capital base which could help them escape
poverty.
A new wave of global land reform is underway within which the legal status of customary
rights held by rural Africans and other indigenous populations around the world is improving.
In a small but growing number of cases in Africa, customary rights are now accorded
equivalent legal force with those acquired through non-indigenous systems under state law
and may be registered under state law. Support for the devolved governance of these rights
at local levels, and building upon customary norms, is also growing.
Constraints upon the delivery of real security abound. The paper points to the need for a
more action-based and community driven evolutionary process. This, it is argued, will better
resolve conceptual confusions that still surround customary tenure and which frustrate sound
policy development and will trigger the empowerment and institution building that are needed
to engender the public ownership of reform. This will help develop political will (which has
otherwise often been transient) for the genuine removal of the chronic tenure insecurity of the
rural poor. It will also help limit the impacts of reform that is broadly market-driven and in the
African context, often primarily seeks to bring as much unoccupied customary land as
possible into the market-place for investor acquisition. Approaches which work from the
community level will also bring threatened commons to the centre of reform, facilitating the
evolution of stronger constructs for the ordering and protection of collective rights. Securing
those rights in clear and inclusive ways will lay a foundation from which their generally poor
shareholders may begin to reap the benefits.
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Resumo
A principal hipótese deste documento é que a insegurança quanto a posse da terra é uma
situação socio-política que pode ser construída – e desfeita. A sua origem encontra-se nas
políticas dos Séculos XIX e XX, que não concederam à ocupação indígena e tradicional o
estatuto de propriedade privada que mereciam. Esta situação privou milhões de pobres da
protecção de que tinham necessidade para resistir aos piores efeitos da transformação
social e da comercialização da terra. As terras e os recursos detidos em comum foram os
que mais sofreram e os mais valiosos foram retirados à posse local ou atribuídos a pessoas
exteriores ou a investidores. As reformas do Século XX melhoraram muitas das vezes o
acesso geral dos pobres à terra, mas tornaram também os direitos tradicionais menos
seguros. Os programas de criação de direitos que converteram a ocupação tradicional em
formas de posse individualizada de tipo europeu extinguiram quase totalmente os direitos de
propriedade secundários ou comuns.
Em África (centro de interesse deste documento), 90 por cento da população rural tem
acesso à terra por tradição e aproximadamente 370 milhões dessas pessoas são definidas
como "pobres". Salvo algumas excepções, o acesso tradicional à terra foi só tolerado e
continua frequentemente a sê-lo. As pessoas que dispõem de direitos tradicionais sobre a
terra vivem muitas das vezes numa terra que é terra do Estado ou pública. Enquanto os
direitos sobre a terra de cultivo e as casas são raramente postos em causa, a posse em
comum de pastagens, florestas e bosques é muito pouco segura. No entanto, essas terras
proporcionam meios de existência importantes aos pobres que, normalmente, ou não
possuem terras de cultivo ou possuem poucas. O valor lucrativo crescente das pastagens,
florestas e bosques ainda é normalmente capturado pelos Estados sob a forma de direitos
de corte de árvores, de agro indústria, de arrendamento e outros. Isto priva as comunidades
pobres de uma base de capital essencial que as poderia ajudar a sair da pobreza.
Está a surgir uma nova onda mundial de reformas agrárias que melhoram o estatuto legal
dos direitos tradicionais das populações rurais africanas e outras populações indígenas do
mundo. Num número pequeno mas crescente de casos em África, os direitos tradicionais
estão a obter uma força legal equivalente àqueles adquiridos por sistemas não-indígenas
segundo a legislação nacional e podem ser registados segundo esse mesmo quadro legal.
Está igualmente a desenvolver-se o apoio a uma boa governação desses direitos a nível
local, bem como a aplicação de normas tradicionais.
São muitos os constrangimentos que travam a concessão de uma verdadeira segurança. O
documento realça a necessidade de processos evolutivos baseados na acção e orientados
para a comunidade. Pretende-se que esses processos resolveriam melhor as confusões
conceptuais que ainda rodeiam a posse tradicional e que frustram um desenvolvimento
político são. A clarificação desta confusão conceptual vai disparar o fornecimento de meios
às populações e reforçar as instituições necessárias para que o público se apodere da
reforma. Isto vai ajudar a desenvolver uma real vontade política (que, por agora, tem sido
efémera) de abolir a insegurança crónica da posse pelos rurais pobres. Vai igualmente
ajudar a limitar o impacto da reforma que é em grande parte orientada pelas leis do mercado
e que, no contexto africano, procura antes de mais levar para o mercado o máximo de terras
tradicionais desocupadas, para aquisição pelos investidores. As abordagens comunitárias
vão ajudar a levar as terras comuns ameaçadas para o centro da reforma, facilitando dessa
forma a criação de uma estrutura mais fortes para organizar e proteger os direitos
colectivos. A garantia desses direitos de forma clara e inclusiva vai lançar os alicerces de
uma estrutura, da qual os interessados geralmente pobres podem começar a colher os
benefícios.
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Resumen
La premisa principal de este documento es el hecho de que la inseguridad de la tenencia de
la tierra es una condición sociopolítica que puede fomentarse, y también evitarse. Sus
orígenes se remontan a las políticas que los siglos XIX y XX que eran incapaces de
conceder a la ocupación autóctona y consuetudinaria su merecida condición de intereses de
propiedad privada. Ese hecho ha privado a millones de personas pobres de la protección
necesaria para hacer frente a los peores efectos de la transformación social y la conversión
de la tierra en un bien de consumo. Los más afectados han sido las tierras y los recursos de
propiedad común, habiendo sido los más valiosos de ellos retirados de la custodia local, o
reasignados a extraños e inversores. En muchos casos, las reformas del siglo 20 han
mejorado el acceso general de los pobres a la tierra pero han contribuido a que los derechos
consuetudinarios sean más inseguros. Los programas de ordenación del suelo por los que
la ocupación consuetudinaria se ha configurado según modalidades de tendencia
individualizada según modelos europeos, han obliterado en gran medida los intereses
inmobiliarios secundarios y de propiedad común.
En África, lugar que se refiere este documento, más del 90% de la población rural obtiene
acceso a tierras de forma consuetudinaria, y en torno a 370 millones de ellos pueden
catalogarse como personas "pobres".
Salvo algunas excepciones, el acceso
consuetudinario a la tierra ha sido meramente permisivo y frecuentemente sigue siendo así.
A menudo, las personas que gozan de derechos consuetudinarios a la tierra viven en
terrenos clasificados de hecho como tierras gubernamentales o públicas. Aunque los
derechos respecto de los campos de cultivo y las viviendas habitualmente no se ven
menoscabados, la tendencia de los pastizales de propiedad común, los bosques y los
prados es sumamente insegura. Pese a ello, esas tierras suponen un apoyo sustancial a los
medios de vida, especialmente de los pobres que, a menudo poseen muy pocas tierras
arables o ninguna. El valor lucrativo y en alza de pastizales, bosques y prados benefician
habitualmente a los gobiernos en la forma de tala de árboles, agrocomercio y tasas por
arrendamiento y usos varios. Esa práctica priva a las comunidades pobres de una base de
capital fundamental que podría ayudarles a escapar de la pobreza.
Caber señalar que está emergiendo una nueva ola de reforma inmobiliaria global, en cuyo
marco se está mejorando la condición jurídica de los derechos consuetudinarios de la
población rural de África y otras poblaciones indígenas en todo el mundo. Aunque a
pequeña y creciente escala en África, los derechos consuetudinarios han adquirido ya un
valor jurídico equivalente de los adquiridos en virtud de sistemas no autóctonos con arreglo
al derecho estatal y pueden registrarse de acuerdo con ese derecho. Asimismo, va
aumentando el desarrollo de la gobernanza de esos derechos a nivel local, apoyándose en
normas consuetudinarias.
Existen muchas trabas a la realización de una seguridad efectiva. El documento expone la
necesidad de un proceso basado en mayor medida en la acción e impulsado por la
comunidad. Se argumenta que ello, resolverá más adecuadamente las confusiones
conceptuales que todavía existen respecto de la tenencia consuetudinaria y que frustran el
desarrollo de políticas idóneas. La resolución de esta confusión conceptual redundará en el
empoderamiento y la creación de instituciones necesarias para generar un sentido de
propiedad pública de la reforma. Asimismo, ayudará a fomentar la voluntad política (a
menudo ausente) para una remoción real de la inseguridad crónica a la tenencia por parte
de los pobres de las zonas rurales. Ayudará también a limitar los efectos de la reforma que,
en general depende del mercado y que, en el contexto africano, tiene por objeto
primariamente colocar en el mercado la mayor extensión posible de terrenos
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consuetudinarios no ocupados para su adquisición por inversores. Los enfoques que se
basen el nivel comunitario ayudarán a que la reforma se centre en esos precarios derechos,
facilitando la evolución de estructuras más idóneas para la ordenación y protección de los
derechos colectivos. La seguridad de esos derechos de forma clara e integral sentará una
base a partir de la cual sus interesados, generalmente pobres, puedan comenzar a recoger
los beneficios.
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Résumé
La présente analyse part de l’hypothèse que l’insécurité des régimes fonciers est une
situation socio-politique que l’on peut faire et défaire. Elle trouve son origine dans les
politiques du XIXe et du XXe siècles qui n’ont pas accordé aux systèmes autochtones et
coutumiers d’occupation des terres, le statut qui leur revenait en tant qu’intérêts privés.
Ainsi, des millions de pauvres se sont vus privés d’une protection indispensable pour lutter
contre les effets les plus néfastes de l’évolution sociale et de la commercialisation des terres.
Les terres et les ressources collectives ont été les plus touchées, les plus intéressantes ont
été soustraites à la tutelle locale ou attribuées à des non-locaux et à des investisseurs. Les
réformes du XXe siècle ont souvent amélioré l’accès global des pauvres à la terre mais elles
ont aussi accru l’insécurité des droits coutumiers. Les programmes mis en place pour
transformer des droits de propriété coutumiers en droits fonciers individualisés dérivés des
régimes fonciers européens ont contribué à l’extinction quasi-générale des droits de
propriété subsidiaires et collectifs.
En Afrique, sujet du présent document, plus de 90 % des populations rurales accèdent à la
propriété foncière par des usages coutumiers et plus de 370 millions de ces ruraux peuvent
être considérés comme « pauvres » par définition. A quelques exceptions près, les normes
coutumières régissant l’accès à la terre étaient plutôt laxistes ce qui demeure généralement
le cas. Les personnes titulaires de droits fonciers coutumiers vivent souvent sur des terres
relevant du domaine public ou appartenant au gouvernement. Même si les droits sur les
terres agricoles et les habitations ne sont habituellement pas contestés, il n’en va pas de
même pour les droits de propriété collective sur les pâtures, les forêts et les terres boisées.
Et pourtant ces terres contribuent largement aux moyens de subsistance, notamment des
pauvres qui, dans la plupart des cas, ne possèdent pas ou peu de terres agricoles. Ce sont
généralement les gouvernements qui s’emparent des profits lucratifs croissants générés par
les pâtures, les forêts et les terres boisées par le biais de redevances sur l’exploitation du
bois, la location de terrains à l’agro-industrie et autres taxes. Les communautés pauvres
sont donc dépossédées d’un capital crucial pour les aider à sortir de la pauvreté.
La nouvelle vague de réformes foncières en cours améliore le statut juridique des droits
coutumiers des populations rurales d’Afrique et d’autres populations autochtones dans le
monde. Dans un nombre de cas encore restreint mais en augmentation, en Afrique, les
droits coutumiers bénéficient dorénavant de la même force juridique que ceux acquis par des
systèmes non autochtones en application d’une législation nationale et peuvent être
enregistrés au regard de cette législation. Le retour à une gouvernance locale de ces droits,
en s’appuyant sur des normes coutumières, recueille un soutien croissant.
L’octroi d’une véritable sécurité doit faire face à de multiples contraintes. Le document
souligne la nécessité d’un processus évolutif plus orienté vers l’action et piloté par les
communautés. Il devrait permettre de dissiper le flou conceptuel qui entoure toujours le droit
foncier coutumier et qui entrave l’élaboration de politiques judicieuses. La clarification de
ces concepts permettra d’assurer la maîtrise et le renforcement des institutions nécessaires
à un contrôle de la réforme par les autorités publiques. Elle permettra de susciter une réelle
volonté politique (laquelle a souvent été passagère) d’élimination de l’insécurité chronique du
régime foncier dans les communautés rurales pauvres. Elle pourra également limiter les
incidences d’une réforme largement dictée par les lois du marché et qui dans le contexte
africain vise essentiellement à mettre sur le marché le plus grand nombre de terres
coutumières inoccupées pour acquisition par les investisseurs.
Les approches
communautaires permettront de mettre les biens collectifs menacés au centre de la réforme,
contribuant à la mise en place d’une structure plus solide pour la classification et la
protection des droits collectifs. C’est en sécurisant ces droits de manière claire et inclusive
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que l’on pourra jeter les bases sur lesquelles les intéressés, pauvres dans l’ensemble,
pourront commencer à s’appuyer pour en récolter les fruits.
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Summary
The Context
Tenure insecurity is a socio-political condition engineered intentionally or otherwise
by policies – and is remediable by policies
In matters of tenure we have failed the world’s agrarian poor even at the turn of the 21st
century. Insecurity of tenure to land and natural resources is still rife. Moreover for many,
insecurity is a creation of the 20th century, arising from colonial and post-colonial policies.
This presentation focuses on Africa but also draws examples from other poor agrarian areas
for comparison. It asks why mass insecurity persists into the 21st century and why policymakers have failed to better limit predictable effects of social transformation and
commoditization of land upon the rural poor. This interrogation is essential if Millennium
Development Goals relating to sufficient means of production may begin to be met. It is also
essential for peace; although governing bodies in the world community have been slow to
acknowledge the centrality of tenure injustice in triggering conflict and civil war, this is
demonstrably the case in many agrarian settings.
Looking to Root Causes
The denial of customary lands as private property lies at the heart of insecurity
This interrogation leads us directly to analysis of the status of customary rights in land.
Virtually all, if not all, rural poor in Sub-Saharan Africa secure land access through customary
means, as do many other indigenous populations in agrarian states around the world. While
causes of insecurity are many, the way in which customary tenure has been legally and
administratively treated over the last century is a root cause of sustained tenure insecurity
among the poor today.
The centralising force of state-making, of both colonial and post-independence states, has
been an important context, undermining both the status of existing local rights to property
and withdrawing authority over these into the hands of governments. Rights to land and
indigenous regimes for ordering and managing those rights have been weakened or
suppressed.
The drivers towards this state of affairs have varied. In Sub Saharan Africa there is plenty of
evidence to suggest that misdirected paternalism, and especially incomprehension of
complex and sophisticated customary land ownership and land access norms, have been
important factors, and important misunderstandings of the latter persist. Political and
administrative convenience has just as clearly played a role.
The primary result has been almost uniform denial of all customary land interests as having
the attributes of private property ownership, therefore condemning those interests to inferior
status as temporal usufruct under the landlord-like tenure of the state. Often the entire
customary sphere (unregistered land areas) have been rendered government or public land,
legally entrenching all customary occupancy and land use as no more than permissive use
rights, able to exist for only as long as government dictates.
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Wrongful attrition has especially affected common properties and the poor
Conceptual difficulties have been particularly experienced with the collective nature of
customary ownership at village or community levels. These are estates like pastures and
woodlands, sensibly owned in undivided shares by all members of the community. Because
they are unoccupied and not always visibly used, unlike farms and houses owned by
identifiable individuals or households, 20th century administrations widely entrenched these
commons as un-owned public land. Accordingly, they have been much more voraciously
interfered with than homesteads, which has better fitted European centric notions of ‘private
property’.
One effect of this dispossession has been to undermine and often disable such community
based mechanisms for their use regulation as existed. This has helped generate the selffulfilling ‘tragedy of the commons’. Another has been to enable governments and aligned
private sector agencies to capture the benefits of commercial use of these community
properties in the form of logging, rental and other fees.
The most serious effect has been to legally enable practical realisation of this dispossession
through outright appropriation of these lands and their reallocation under statutory tenure
regimes to government’s own agencies or interested entrepreneurs of its choice. Some of
this has been in genuine pursuit of assumed greater public purpose, such as in the creation
of national forest and wildlife parks and reserves. Much of it, however, has been wilful
expropriation for private purpose, justified as supporting the national economy. While eviction
from houses and farmlands has generally seen payment of at least compensation for the loss
of standing crops or buildings, the 20th century entrenchment of community owned lands as
unoccupied, and therefore even customarily un-owned, estates has seen not even this low
level of compensation paid.
This dispossession amounts to several hundred million hectares in Sub Saharan Africa, and
has echoes globally where indigenous tenures have similarly not been accorded their rightful
status as private property regimes. Fortunately several hundred million hectares of
customary commons remain accessible to the rural poor. Less fortunately, persistent failure
to accord these properties recognition as the private group-owned property of communities
renders them still highly vulnerable to wrongful loss and occupancy. This threat most impacts
upon poorer community members, who not only depend disproportionately upon common
assets for livelihood, but whose shareholding in the community property may be their only
real asset.
Attempts at remedy
There have been exceptions on all continents and attempts at remedy, mainly through
widespread redistributive land reforms targeted at tenants and workers. In Africa 20th century
reforms were mainly in the form of titling initiatives, designed to convert existing customary
occupancy into European-derived forms of land holding and to register these on the basis of
formal survey. This has been most systematically pursued in Kenya, primarily intended to
provide a basis upon which ‘progressive’ farmers could obtain loans. Fifty years on, and with
still under half the rural domain titled, it is apparent that conversion has not done away with
customary norms in those areas, that titling has not prompted significant mortgaging, and
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that the security of tenure that widely exists in the farm sector does not derive from the often
corrupted registration or the holding of title deeds. Nor has the promised reduction in land
conflict occurred, with a whole new generation of conflict clogging the courts, due often to
contrary customary and statutory norms. Like most countries in Africa, Kenya is looking to
reform, and within which the real status of customary land interests is being reviewed, and
those that have been attributed to it over the last century, beginning to be overturned.
The Promise of Real Reform
Liberation of customary tenure from a century of suppression
Dramatic improvement in the legal status of unregistered customary land interests is globally
on the horizon. This is particularly evident in Latin America where the traditional land rights of
indigenous peoples in at least twelve states have seen equitable entrenchment. It is also
evident in parts of Asia and in the developed world, where the customary land rights of
indigenous minorities in Canada, Australia and New Zealand are seeing fairer legal
interpretation through new supreme court rulings and practical delivery on the implications.
Reform in the status of customary land rights is also taking hold in Africa where, if carried
through, could remove at least the legal insecurity of tenure of some 500 million rural
dwellers, two-thirds of whom are definitively poor or very poor.
As everywhere around the world, this is emerging less as an objective in its own right than as
a consequence of market-driven strategies which seek to bring much more land into the
market-place, for mainly local and foreign investor acquisition and development. Titling is
again back on the agenda to enable the level of formality the market requires. This is being
counterbalanced by the more socially accountable imperatives of modernising democratic
governance. Together with recognition of the limitations of past titling, this is encouraging
one administration after the other to look more closely at what exactly is to be registered and
how.
Recognising customary land interests as private property rights
The emerging result is increasing opportunity around the sub-continent for customary
landholders to register their occupancy ‘as is’; without conversion into freehold, leasehold or
other imported forms. This in turn is generating new policies and laws which acknowledge
customary land interests as legal private property rights and, just as important - holding equal
legal force with rights acquired under non-customary systems, and whether they are
registered or not. This has been most simply and comprehensively entrenched in law in
Uganda, Tanzania and Mozambique. It is more circuitously a legal fact in several other
countries (e.g. South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Ghana), and in different forms the legal fact
(e.g. Ethiopia), or moving partially or fully towards these positions (e.g. Lesotho, Malawi,
Niger, Mali, Benin, Guinea, Cote D’Ivoire) or ‘under consideration’ (e.g. Zambia and Kenya).
Other elements of land reform are contributing, including some release in widespread cooption of ultimate property title and powers by the central State, so far only totally done away
with in Uganda (and never having existed in Botswana, Namibia or South Africa). Wider
attention to the rights of women are gradually ensuring that new constructs recognising
ownership at household level are under consideration, prominently including better provision
for family title, a presumption of spousal co-ownership and imposition of consent conditions,
requiring both/all spouses to agree to disposal of the primary family home and farm.
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The helping hand of governance and natural resource management reforms
Corollary reforms in the local government and natural resource management sector are
contributing drivers. ‘Local conventions’ (state recognition of locally-brokered land access
and use agreements) in Sahelian states help regularise conflicting use of pastures and
trigger more attention to how those resources are owned or not owned. The forestry sector is
playing a special role in giving practical frameworks to forested common properties as
Community Forest Reserves, now provided for in upwards of 20 states, and urging delivery
of new property class constructs to enable local ownership of these to be embedded. Aided
by the democratizing trends of local government reform, community level institutions
specifically for land administration are beginning to be established, building variably upon
customary norms.
Constraints
Constraints and limitations abound. In practice there is more deconcentration of state
agencies at the local level that real devolutionary empowerment of community level bodies.
Delivery or assisted uptake of opportunities is also limited. Much of the impressive progress
remains on the written page. Programme design is distinctively unwieldy and tends to rest
upon costly state-driven institution reforms. Backtracking on important commitments, even
before policies and legislation are finalised is common, political will blanching less at costs,
than the implications of losing authority over land and constraints that may limit private sector
access to land.
Helping customary owners get hold of investment -or helping investors get hold of
customary lands?
On the ground, insecurity of tenure is little changed. The security of common properties is
particularly threatened as investment interest in these unfarmed lands grows with economic
liberalism. The idea of unoccupied land as un-owned public land is seeing resurgence.
These lands possess enormous current and future production and rental real estate values
which could help the poor clamber out of poverty; a fact not lost upon governments and
investors, who continue to be the beneficiaries for as long as these are not defined and
entrenched as community property. Many constraints upon progress in this and other areas
exist, including those that stem from routine difficulties facing social change and/or are
country specific. However, analytically, the following fundamental inhibitors need particular
attention:
i.
Unresolved policy contradictions arising from the dominance of land market
promotion objectives over and above mass securitisation of tenure
ii. Revived justification of rights certification for the purpose of collateralisation,
narrowing the target to individually-held properties, and shaping process and
persistent requirements for formal survey of properties; driven by what lenders need
(or think they need) rather than what are necessary or viable for majority interests to
be secured
iii. A still incomplete understanding of customary rights and their embedded systems,
producing confused strategies and limiting legal provision for needed constructs to
embed distinctions reflecting collective and family tenure
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iv. The time-old problem of poor process, in both the formulation of policy and delivery;
largely through the absence of a sufficiently community-based approach to deliver
relevant and realistic proposals and procedures, and to engage the popular
ownership of changes required to drive and sustain political will.
The main effects are:
i.
Continued and even increasing vulnerability of unoccupied customary lands – the
commons – to wrongful attrition and formal appropriation
ii. Over-attention to classical registration and the search for innovative technical tools
within this limited framework, at the cost of building upon locally tried-and-tested and
socially legitimate mechanisms for ownership certification
iii. Growing divides among what policy promises, law entrenches and what occurs on the
ground; flagging political will and rising popular disenchantment - ultimately leading to
conflict.
Enabling Reform
Adopting developmentally-sound and poverty-focused change
Two lead and integrated strategies are advocated towards the much proclaimed objective of
current land reform to increase the tenure security of the rural poor: first, restructuring reform
in strict accordance with prioritisation of levels of threat to the security of the rural poor, and
second, adopting a devolved and landholder-driven approach to reform in general, thereby
generating a focused and action-based process to ensure relevance, client control and real
relief.
Both will have the effect of bringing the security of common properties over and above lessthreatened individually held estates (houses and farms) to the centre of reform. This will
necessarily be made real within the context of a facilitated process of inter-community
agreement as to respective limits of jurisdiction in the form of distinct communal domains,
and within which properties owned in common exist as one category of estates, with family
and individual estates being other main categories. Such exercises lead logically to
establishment (or reformation) of community based institutions for the regulation of land
relations within these domains, and in whom ultimate or symbolical community title may be
vested. These steps alone can sharply raise the protection of commonage against wrongful
designation as un-owned government or public land. On-the-ground demarcation of specific
common estates within the domain should follow, each entrenched along with agreed upon
access rules as the private group owned property of all members of the community, including
the poor.
In the process, persistent conceptual confusions around distinctions between collective
authority and collective property ownership, between symbolical and real property rights,
between ownership and access rights, and intra family distinctions as to decision-making
rights, will be better ironed out and appropriate new tenure and governance norms
entrenched.
12
Reform overall will be better instructed. Through local ownership of changes, the poor will be
better able to protect their interests and popular will better engage, shape and sustain
political will. Opportunities to realize the commons as the capital of the poor will be realized.
I
The Setting:
Tenure Insecurity, Poverty and Power Relations
Tenure insecurity is a socio-political condition engineered by policies – and
remediable by policies
Insecurity and poverty
Insufficient land to live on and insecure access or rights over land are recognised factors in
sustaining poverty. The main thrust of 20th century reforms was towards equitable
distribution, implemented in more than thirty agrarian states.1 Current reformism – and this
paper – focuses less on distribution than on security of ownership or access to land which
rural people have traditionally held. This entrenches reformism yet further in the social justice
spheres. Security of land tenure is arguably the most important human right of those who
need that land to survive, having no other means of production.
Looking beyond the farm
While there is growing evidence that off-farm incomes may begin to rival farming as the
foundation of livelihood, security of occupancy and land to use remains pivotal in the survival
of the rural poor.2 This includes secure rights over pasture and forest lands, of uniform
importance to the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Central Asia, where most of those
defined as ‘poor’ live.3 Insecure tenure or access probably afflicts half of these one billion
people - and for reasons that are largely avoidable. As this paper intends to make clear,
tenure insecurity is first and foremost a socio-political condition that grows from chronic to
severe and may eventuate into outright dispossession in the face of changing policies – and
regimes.
Insecurity and conflict
The linkages with conflict cannot be ignored – although (curiously so, given the long history
of land grievances in every revolution) peace making often still fails to grasp the centrality of
conflict over land in civil war, or at least to ensure that routes to remedy are explicitly laid
down in peace agreements. Failure to more than superficially do this hampers post-conflict
resolution.4 Unsurprisingly, conflicts simmer and may restart war at the slightest provocation
1
These took the form of either recognising longstanding tenant farmers as owners (e.g.
Japan, Korea, Taiwan), liberating farmers in serf-like arrangements through similar recognition
of ownership (e.g. Egypt, Bolivia), or breaking up large estates for subdivision into family
farms (e.g. Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela) or providing new arrangements for access to
land through state collectives or cooperative enterprises (e.g. Bulgaria, Romania, Vietnam,
Cuba and Mexico). See FAO 2003 and Borras, Kay & Lodhi 2005 for excellent short reviews.
2
Grace and Pain 2004, Rigg 2006.
3
Respectively 70% and 66% of people in South Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa live in
rural areas and 75% of both groups live on less than $2 a day (Population Reference Bureau
2005).
4
Hurwitz et al. 2005.
13
– currently the case in Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of
Congo - and threatening to be the case in Sudan.5
Looking for cause
Interrogation of the causes of tenure insecurity of tenure is imperative not just for peace but
for fighting poverty. The bold targets of the Millennium Development Goals add urgency. The
correlation between insecurity of tenure and being poor itself hardly needs review, routinely
illustrated in vulnerability assessments. These throw up pertinent other correlates that need
to be kept in mind. One such finding is that achieving sufficient and secure access to land
could have more direct impact on poverty alleviation in the hands of rural women than men,
given the well-documented prioritisation by female farmers towards feeding children and
investing in their health care and education.6 Attending to women’s land rights becomes yet
more important.
The product of modern policy
Setting aside historically-embedded landlessness in especially Asian pre-colonial economies,
insecurity over traditionally accessed natural resources has a relatively recent history. In the
forms it takes today it is primarily a 19th and 20th century phenomenon, a predictable (and
sometimes intended) consequence of first, modern state-making and second, social
transformation and commoditisation of resources, exaggerated by less predicted soaring
population growth and a dwindling per capita resource base.
The founding argument of this paper is that allowing insecurity to grow and fester over the
20th century was partly the result of strategy and partly an analytical failure. Discussion
focuses on one of the more fundamental and ill-attended to elements, one that reaches into
the heart of how the right to land is conceived and governed. The root of this is historic and
continued abuse of indigenous or customary tenure regimes, engendered by lack of
understanding or wilful misunderstanding and manipulation. The main effect has been to
deny these indigenous (or ‘customary’) land interests the protection they required – and still
require – to withstand involuntary losses or encroachment.
In this way, significant dimensions in the insecurity and instability of land access are
politically and administratively engendered. There are constructive implications in this
conclusion, for in principle what has been made can be unmade. Finding the right remedies
and engaging the necessary level of political will, are as ever, the material of successful
reform.
A focus on Africa
In pursuing this thesis, the focus is upon Sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 90 percent of
the rural population regulate their day-to-day land relations on a customary basis building
upon systems that are indigenous to the area.7 Around three quarters of these customary
landholders or users are definably ‘poor’ (370 million people).8 It is their interests that this
5
Unruh 2004, Huggins et al. 2005, Alden Wily 2003a, Alden Wily forthcoming.
Carter 2005.
7
This is reflected in the fact that by area, statutory rights are the basis of rural occupancy and
use for less than 2-10 percent of each country area (Augustinus & Deininger 2005). Many of
these rights are evidenced by deeds of purchase, not cadastral registration.
8
Population Reference Bureau 2005.
6
14
paper will focus on although those interests can of course not be separated from the
interests of that quarter of customary landholders who are not so poor.
Lessons are also drawn from other regions where customary or indigenous (the terminology
is interchangeable) tenure operates. This is the case in parts of Central and South Asia (e.g.
Afghanistan, India & Indonesia) where several hundred million people organise their land
rights by customary norms. 9 This may be integrated with religious tenure norms, Islamic
Shari’a attending in detail to property matters.10 Customary tenure is also the norm in arid
pastoral zones (North Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East). In Latin America around 40
million indigenous people traditionally hold land through customary mechanisms, and
represent the majority rural population several states.11
Customary/Indigenous tenure as community based
In all cases the exercise of customary tenure is significantly modified, regulated and/or
nested within other, dominant State regimes. The nature of that support is a necessary
subject of this paper. As the ambitions of mid 20th century conversionary entitlement
programmes all too well illustrated, until very recently, customary mechanisms persisted only
in default of the limited reach of imported tenure regimes.
The common characteristics of customary/indigenous land tenure systems are many and
equally resilient across customary societies. This is largely because they share one single
powerful and immovable structural foundation, and from which most norms proceed: they are
community based in their reference and adherence. They are distinct therefore from other
pre-State landholding systems (e.g. feudal tenure) in that the right holders are voluntary
participants of the system.
Customary tenure regimes are also essentially agrarian regimes, and within which shared
ownership and access to certain resources like pastures, forests and moors, is appropriately
held in undivided shares.
II
The Subordination of Customary Land Rights
From a governance rather than economic transformation perspective, three widely consistent
trends affecting customary rights have jeopardised their security. The first has interfered with
localised control over land relations, the second with spheres of that jurisdiction and the third
with the nature of customary land rights themselves. The three combined in suppression
9
For example around 60 million people in Indonesia self-identify themselves as ‘people living
by custom’ (indigenous peoples) (Colchester et al. 2004).
10
An estimate 10 million rural people in Afghanistan regulate their land relations through a mix
of customary and Islamic Shari’a law (Alden Wily 2003a). A significant number of people in
both these examples fall into the classifiably ‘poor’ 75% of rural dwellers in Central and South
Asia (Population Reference Bureau 2005).
11
They constitute the majority population in Guatemala (66%) and Bolivia (58%) and are
significant minorities in Peru (47%) and Ecuador (43%) and number 12 million people in
Mexico (14%). They represent large minorities in Mexico and Peru and the majority in Bolivia
and Guatemala (Colchester (ed.) 2001, Kay and Urioste 2005).
15
and/or reconstruction of ‘native’ or indigenous rights. This continues unchecked in many
parts of the poor agrarian world today.12
Disempowering localised land authority
The first has institutional dimensions delivered in the centralisation of authority over local
land relations that occurred in colonial state-making and often replayed in new regimemaking since. New state-makers often felt they could not afford either valuable natural
resources or resource-dependent populations to not be subject to their will. In agrarian states
this cannot be better put into operation than by taking control of land relations; determining
exactly who may use the land and how and with what degree of security.
Needless to say, existing indigenous systems for governing land relations were widely
disabled. Or they were reconstructed to the service of new central authority, a norm that was
eventually institutionalised as Indirect Rule in Anglophone Africa, and which has reflective
elements in Francophone Africa.13 The transformations that occurred still make it difficult to
determine how far current customary land administration is a manufacture of the colonial
era.14
What is known is that consensual mechanisms for land decision-making narrowed
throughout the continent into the hands of Government appointed ‘native authorities’. Chiefs
were recognised (or not recognised) according to criteria set by Administrations not their
people. Their new role as tax collectors - and the source of their own new ‘wages’ –
encouraged rent-seeking in land matters and reinforced their upward looking accountability
to Governors. Landlord-like attributes were sometimes acquired along the way. This is
illustrated in Ghana where land and resource deprived revenue from common properties is
not even constitutionally required to be shared by chiefs with community members.15 An
important concern of current reforms surrounds the meaning of trusteeship, a problematic
also of concern at higher levels where undue powers of disposition over national property
have been acquired by presidents.16
The quality of indigenous regimes or the justice they advanced does not concern us here except to note that they were probably sufficient for the pressures of the time, and could
pragmatically evolve to meet new demands, a capacity that has been truncated through
advancing State regulation, as well as recurrent enthusiastic initiatives to codify rules. Both
have contributed to stultification of norms that could and should have evolved. Of more
immediately concern is the community level disempowerment that has occurred in respect of
land relations. Ironically, it is precisely the community consensual framework of pre-State
regimes to which devolutionary good governance now looks.
Reconstructing the communal domain
12
How far these occurred wilfully, through benign neglect, or through lack of understanding
need not preoccupy us. In Africa, colonial policies, from whence subordination derives,
indisputably had well-intentioned sides. A common example was to deny ‘natives’ the right to
sell land, “to safeguard the ignorant and improvident peasant from selling his whole heritage”.
This can just as easily be seen as integral to the broader determination to control resources.
13
Ribot 1999, Ribot & Larson (eds) 2005. There are also echoes in the early period of
Spanish colonialism in Latin America (Colchester (ed.) 2001, Kay and Urioste 2005).
14
And generated an enormous critical literature e.g. Biebuyck 1963 and Colson 1971.
15
Alden Wily & Hammond 2001.
16
Alden Wily & Mbaya 2001.
16
Customary domains have often been rearranged, dismantled or diminished in the process to
suit the geographical logic of administrative demand. All over Africa, smaller village based
systems were widely disrobed of authority during colonial periods, often absorbed into more
powerful domains.17 Areas of particular interest to administrations were simply excluded from
customary aegis. A well-intentioned example has been the removal of valuable forests from
local custodianship from around the 1930s onwards. Restitution of partial or full authority to
community levels is an important thrust of modern forest policy today, following the broad
failure of centralized management.18
Diminishing the right to land
It is in the treatment of the customary right itself that the strongest diminishment of the
customary land interests of the rural poor has most occurred. Key elements are described
below.
Reducing customary ownership to usufruct
The most fundamental was in widespread denial that customary rights amounted to private
property rights that could accord with European notions of private property or even eventuate
even into those imported norms, without a conversionary (and individualising) procedure.
Thus while the occupancy and use of customary land holders was widely accepted (it could
not be otherwise), they were in law and practice viewed as mere tenants of the State, living
on what was increasingly defined as ‘public land’. Thus began the orthodoxy of African
usufruct, one of the more powerful instruments of subordination, and only latterly seeing
change. The approach was applied throughout much of Anglophone, Francophone and
Lusophone Africa,19 and with broadly similar effect upon indigenous properties in the Indian
sub-continent and Spanish and Portuguese colonised Latin America.20
A main benefit to colonisers was clear: customary landholders could be easily evicted at will
and with compensation generally only payable for the loss of beneficial use, such as for the
value of standing crops lost by the eviction. Such terms were everywhere retained in postindependence law.21
While the presumed prerogative of the conqueror came into play, the effects amount to much
more than establishing sovereignty, spilling over into additionally appropriating all existing
property rights to the land conquered. This was despite being warned that this was neither
just nor permitted in metropolitan law by Spanish jurists as early as the 15th and 16th
centuries, Dutch and English scholars in the 16th and 17th century, and the US Supreme
Court in 1823, the New Zealand Supreme Court in 1847 and British Privy Council decisions
in respect of the colonies of Southern Rhodesia and Nigeria in 1919 and 1921.22
Such opinions did not alter the position of colonising states, nor governments that have
followed. Indeed, if anything, the evident fusion of sovereignty with proprietary has
entrenched with the majority of post-independent governments securing to themselves not
17
Salih 1982 provides a detailed case by case example of how this was accomplished in one
province of Sudan.
18
FAO 2002, Alden Wily 2000b.
19
A main exception was in Ghana where Ashanti Chiefs managed to hold onto ‘allodial title’
with critical effect today (Alden Wily & Hammond 2001).
20
Griffiths 2001.
21
Alden Wily & Mbaya 2001.
22
Colchester (ed.) 2001.
17
just control over property relations but the ultimate rights of ownership of the estates
themselves.23
Customary tenants, with their land rights already de-secured in principle have found
themselves increasingly vulnerable to involuntary loss of lands with each step of the
expanding economy and rising land demand. In Uganda, for example, all unregistered land
was made Crown Land in 1912, redefined as Public Land in 1969, and customary occupants
redefined in 1975 as ‘tenants at sufferance’ and whose consent was no longer needed to
evict them (since remedied as shown later).
The situation in neighbouring Sudan was, and remains, yet more pernicious. Through a new
law in 1970 all customarily owned land (‘unregistered land’) not only became government
land overnight but then government began to be systematically reallocated to entrepreneurs,
both local and foreign, of its choice.24 In one province alone, local customary owners have
been so ‘legally’ dispossessed of 3.4 million acres. Needless to say, such blatant abuse of
customary land rights was an important trigger to civil war and persists as a factor in
continuing conflicts, including in Darfur.25
Reducing complex ownership patterns to euro-centric simplicity
The internal arrangements of customary land relations have also been interfered with. The
notion of collective tenure at family, clan, village and community levels has been anathema
to governments, past and present. These are difficult to squeeze into imported individualcentric norms (evolved to meet non-agrarian needs), and awkward to control in mortgagedriven ideas of how ownership should be registered.
The existence of interests customarily subordinate to ownership interests has also been
jeopardized, either not provided for at all in dominating external regulation or registration of
rights or incorrectly made equivalent to ownership rights, engendering a great deal of conflict
in both spheres. Much has been written on how systematic registration of customary
ownership where it has been advanced at scale has caused great loss especially to women’s
rights, usually described as secondary rights or access rights, but which are more accurately
located as a not just access but a loss of a controlling right, the right to share in the decisionmaking as to the disposition of the property (see later).
Regulation of access rights to pasture has been particularly disturbed and important
customary distinctions between rights of access and ownership have oftentimes been
ignored. Depending upon political or administrative interest, shared ownership of pastures
has not been acknowledged. At other times pastoral groups have been granted lands to
settle in areas which they themselves acknowledge belonged to others. Many Sahelian
conflicts have mismanagement of different layers of interest at their root and which may
contribute to civil war, as is the case in Sudan.26
Not unrelated is manipulation of the principle of freedom to settle anywhere, which may be
promoted or denied in accordance with political interest and generally overrides customary
norms.27
23
Details in Alden Wily and Mbaya 2001.
Johnson 2003.
25
Alden Wily forthcoming.
26
Johnson 2003, Alden Wily forthcoming.
27
See Lavigne Delville et al. 2002 for West African examples, including that resulting in the
current civil war in Cote D’Ivoire.
24
18
Denying collective ownership of uncultivated lands
A common root of much of the above has been to deny or weaken ownership of property in
common. The dominant strategy has been to administratively treat these as ownerless lands,
and for these to be accordingly co-opted by the state. In Sudan for example, an early
proclamation by the British-Egyptian Condominium was to declare all ‘waste, forest and
unoccupied lands’ the property of Government (1905). In one fell sweep, more than 150
million hectares of invaluable (albeit often arid) pasture and woodlands of property were lost
to communities, in law, and progressively activated in practice.28
In practice, a certain amount of cherry picking occurs: normally settlements are left with their
nearest commonage into which to expand settlement and farming, and the rest is definitively
treated as government or public lands. Local use generally continues, reinforcing the idea of
customary tenure as amounting to no more than usufruct. At the same time the deprivation of
acknowledgement of tenure removes the incentive for community based regulation to evolve
to meet advancing pressures.
The orthodoxy of public land as un-owned community use lands has led inexorably to selffulfilling open-access problems, as inexorably rebuked as ‘the tragedy of the commons’. A
little imagination combined with less rapacity would have located these lands as not
ownerless at all but very much the customarily shared estate of all members of a definable
community – and provided the framework for evolving purposive protection and management
over a transforming 20th century.
Misunderstanding the foundations
A contributing factor has been lack of conceptual distinction between communal property (or
common property) and communal tenure. Broadly the first is best seen as real estate (i.e.
properties which have boundaries and owners and which may be mapped and described). In
contrast communal tenure is best glossed as a regime of land administration (and less
confusingly referred to as customary tenure). Like all land administration and management
regimes, it comprises norms, regulations and enforcement mechanisms.
The distinction manifests at the local level in the following manner. Customarily a community
(or chief on its behalf) will generally have an area over which it claims authority and this may
be referred to as communal domain, or most clearly as a ‘community land area’. This is an
area of jurisdiction, not a property per se. Characteristically, this comprises a range of
different properties; houses, farms and shops that are customarily owned by individuals or
families; group assets which may be owned by a sub-set of the community such as a sacred
forest being owned by certain male elders; and common properties – resources like swamps,
forests and pastures, regarded as common property in which all members of the community
have an equal shareholding.
III
th
Attempting Remedy: 20 Century Reform
The upshot of the foregoing is that even as recently as 1990 most customary and indigenous
owners around the world did not legally own their land or did not legally own all their land.
28
Alden Wily forthcoming.
19
In Africa, the majority were tenants of state, living permissively on State Lands, Government
Lands, Public Lands, Homelands, Communal Lands or Trust Lands – all distinguished by
being under the de jure or de facto ownership of the state and in all cases under the control
of government, either directly or through local authorities designated for that purpose.
This is not the say that that attempts to remedy the situation had not taken place. On the
contrary, the 20th century was replete with reformism. This occurred in waves, from early
Russian and Mexican reforms before the First World War, to those in the Soviet Socialist
Republics after that War, to a flurry of reformism from the 1940s to 1980s involving Latin
American and Asian states. These had redistribution of unequally owned farmland as their
objective and were usually targeted at tenants and farm workers, and mainly delivered in
subdivision of large estates or the creation of large state collective or cooperative farms.29
Securing customary holdings through conversionary titling
Excepting Ethiopia (1975) and Zimbabwe (1980) redistributive reform passed Sub-Saharan
Africa by. Such action as there was mainly focused upon securing existing rights of small
farmers through systematic registration, an emerging theme of land reform in itself, and
implemented in a number of countries including at scale in Afghanistan between 19631878.30 Customary interests were converted into European-derived freeholds or leaseholds
or other such ownership rights. This was intensively implemented only in Kenya (from 1954)
with smaller initiatives in a number of other states including Uganda, Senegal, Ghana and
Somalia).31 Despite enormous investment and effort, particularly in Kenya where rural titling
continues 50 years on, less than two percent of rural lands in most countries is today
covered by formal survey and entitlement, and only 15 percent of Kenya.32
As elsewhere these titling exercises gained the correct denotation as ITR - individualization,
registration and titling - given their uniform effects of registering ownership of family houses
and farms in the name of (mainly male) household heads (see below). The success of firstworld property mortgaging drove the programme: the idea that farmers needed loans to raise
production or to buy up the unproductive farms of their less progressive neighbours, and to
get loans they needed certificates of formal entitlement as collateral. Disputes would decline
as everyone would have fixed boundaries.
In hindsight, the mortgaging of peasant farms in Sub-Saharan Africa has proved largely a
non-starter. In Kenya for example, farm production has risen or not risen to similar degree in
both the titled and un-titled sectors.33 Rates of rural mortgaging remain very low, partly due to
low demand, partly due to availability of less risky alternatives than possible foreclosure
threatens, and in any event, limited access to mortgages in rural areas, given the reluctance
of banks to destroy the entire livelihood of a family in the event of foreclosure and fears of
29
See Cox et al. (2003) & Borras, Kay & Lodhi (2005) for excellent overviews.
Under a massive USAID programme, expending what in today’s terms would have been
billions of dollars, involving over 400 Ford vehicles in the field at any one time and 645
technicians, and yet covered (in non-cadastral survey) only 45% of farmers. The exercise was
also used to entrench government ownership of all pastures and ‘barren’ land and over
800,000 ha of farmland for which peasants could not pay taxes was made government land
(Alden Wily 2003a).
31
Bruce & Migot-Adholla (eds.) 1994.
32
Augustinus & Deininger 2005.
33 Cotula et al. 2005.
30
20
repercussion against such attempts from within the community.34 Nor did the promise of
decline in disputes through titling materialize; while boundary disputes have fallen, a new
generation of conflicts has arisen due to titling, mainly given contradictory customary and
statutory routes of sale and inheritance and clogging up the courts.35
The delivery of security itself is in doubt. The promised sanctity of title deeds has dwindled
with corrupted procedure. The register is Kenya is famously out-of-date due to erratic
recordation of transactions and the greater proportion of original title deeds not even
collected, partly because of the high cost and effort involved in doing so, but partly because it
is not considered necessity for security.36 Research has shown that farmers find the process
of adjudication positive for it clarifies and confirms who owns what, but once this is achieved,
the incentive to collect title deeds is diminished.37 This reflects the importance of socialembeddnessness in tenure security and from whence, for customary owners, it derives - the
consensus of neighbours and community, not a remote and manipulable title deed.
As Bromley has remarked:
“the issuance of formal title to the poor means that they must now decide to exchange
their embeddedness in one community for an embeddedness in another community.
In the absence of reasonable assurance that the new community (the government)
can offer more effective protection than the current one, the switch may not be
obviously superior” (2005:7).
Ignoring or abusing collective titling
It is also now well known that many land rights have been lost or de-secured through
conversionary entitlement. As noted earlier, women have been a main group of losers, their
spouses, brothers or fathers conventionally named as owners. Secondary rights as held by
customary access right holders to the registered property were extinguished by failure to
record these on the title, much later now upheld by the courts.38
Most shareholdings in collective properties also disappeared, commons in the community
often being subdivided among the better-off few who have the capacity to expand farming
into these lands. The larger and more valuable commons of the community such as natural
forests, have generally been handed over to local government authorities to manage, and
who in turn have frequently disposed of these valuable lands to local authority or alleged
personal benefit.39
Even where collective titles were provided, such as through the creation of over 300 group
ranches for pastoral Masai, the fashioning of these around raised livestock production saw
the poorer non-livestock owning members of the clan often excluded as members.40
Subsequent subdivision of most ranches has seen further losses.41 Broadly similar effects
have been experienced elsewhere, including South Africa42 and Botswana where group
34
Bruce & Migot-Adholla 1994, Platteau 2000, World Bank 2003a.
Hard data on this in Alden Wily & Mbaya 2001.
36
KLC 2003.
37
Hunt forthcoming.
38
Kameri-Mbote 2005.
39
Alden Wily & Mbaya 2001.
40
Mwangi & Dohrn 2005.
41
Ibid.
42
Cousins et al. 2005.
35
21
ranches on communal land may be seen as no more than cooption of common resources by
elites, often not even from the area.43
IV
An End of Century Turn-Around: Towards the Liberation of Customary
Land Rights
Nonetheless, a turn-around in the land security of the rural poor of Africa began to occur in
the last decade of the century. Many (but not all) who traditionally access land through
customary mechanisms could benefit. And of course the consistent route is through better
treatment of the customary right to land itself, generally aided by growing support for
community-based mechanisms to deliver and sustain those rights.
Such changes are not limited to Africa. In Indonesia, for example there are signs that many
millions and particularly those 60 million who self-identify themselves as ‘people living by
custom’ (indigenous groups) could also begin to benefit from the rising legitimacy of custom
in land tenure and governance, and more specifically from improving opportunities to put the
accepting principle of collective title (hak ulayat) into practice.44
A more advanced wave of reform is affecting the rights of millions of people who ‘live by
custom’ in Latin America (indigenous peoples). Twelve countries have passed new
constitutions and land laws which directly protect indigenous land rights in ways not
embraced before (nor provided through redistributive access reforms).45 These changes
allow for mainly collective forms of root entitlement, leaving community members to parcel
out rights within those domains.
In Bolivia for example, where indigenous people constitute over half the rural population, a
new land law in 1996 creates the concept of Community Lands of Origin and enables the
restitution of large territories in favour of original inhabitants. As Kay and Urioste describe,
this is a complex matter, requiring review and regularization of land titles handed out by the
agrarian reform since 1953, and is slow and inevitably contested (2005). Conflict between
indigenous and non-indigenous interests is widespread elsewhere in the region as similar
adjustments are made. Competition with logging, gas and mining concessionaires, backed
by substantial international capital, complicate resolution.46 Demarcation of boundaries has
everywhere been slow, but with innovative community based mapping initiatives operating in
Peru and Belize.47 Colombia and Mexico are advanced in recognizing customary regimes
and their authorities as the lawful administrators of these lands.48
The global aspect of the shifting position is also seen in relevant first world states, in
Supreme Court rulings in Canada (1973, 1997), Australia (1992, 1998) and also Malaysia
(1997, 2001). These respond to demands for land rights recognition by indigenous minorities
in those states. Significantly these rulings less overturn existing law than reinterpret it. They
concur that customary land rights are private property rights that must be respected and
upheld and continue to exist for as long as they are purposively extinguished.49 Establishing
43
Cullis & Watson 2005.
Colchester, Sirait and Widjardjo 2004.
45
Griffiths 2001.
46
Colchester (ed.) 2001.
47
Griffiths 2001.
48
Griffiths 2001.
49
Colchester (ed.) 2001.
44
22
sovereignty – the main route for subordination of customary land rights throughout the world,
as exampled earlier in respect of Africa – does not in itself extinguish these rights.50
These rulings have already begun to impact upon customary rights in other areas, notably in
the constitutional court ruling in South Africa in 2003 that the Richtersveld area must be
returned to the San (Bushmen) owners, and claims from comparable indigenous groups in
Guyana and Belize.51
The origins of reform: bringing more land into the market place
Rarely are these changes emerging from policies which make the tenure security of
customary or other informal occupants their priority. They arise everywhere under the
embrasure of a new wave of land reform, of which they one part, or eventual consequence.
Unlike the character of previous reforms towards redistribution, this new phase is distinctively
market-based.52 These drivers are clearest outside the African continent, in the privatization
of the large state and collective farms of previous reform eras. In Africa it is best reflected in
the ‘willing buyer willing seller’ mechanism being used (with limited success) in South Africa
towards redistribution.53
In line with this shift, the flagging collateralization approach is also being widely revitalized,
encouraged (once again) by international lending and development agencies. In the hands of
its most famous new advocate, Hernando de Soto, it gains a stronger foothold in the land
market camp with the implication that tenure security is only worth pursuing if the affected
property can be turned to profit; the old ‘sand to gold’ trail now one of ‘turning dead capital
into live capital’.54
Making customarily owned land freely available for investors
However for most African states the market driver to reform in the treatment of land
ownership has more straightforward origins, although eventually dressed up otherwise;
simply to get a lot more of the land tied up in the customary sector into the market place, and
as quickly and cheaply as possible.
This has origins in the economic liberalization policies that began to emerge in the late 1880s
under the persuasive guiding hand of the World Bank and the IMF.55 The argument was
familiar: vast injections of investment (and specifically lucrative foreign investment) were
needed to restart stagnant agrarian economies; investors, especially agribusiness, need
land, and they need (their version of) secure title to that land. In addition they need efficient
land administration systems to speedily process and guarantee that tenure. 56
Thus the modus operandi was not helping poor farmers get their hands on investment but
helping investors get their hands on the land of poor farmers.
50
Nor does the issue of statutory leaseholds affect these rights which continue to survive,
although issue of absolute title is acknowledged as having this effect. McAuslan 2005.
51
Colchester (ed.) 2001, McAuslan 2005.
52
Refer Borras, Kay and Lodhi (2005) for an excellent analysis.
53
Oxfam 2005a.
54
De Soto 2000.
55
Alden Wily 2000.
56
See Alden Wily & Mbaya 2001 for scrutiny of the origins of fourteen first generation reforms.
23
Getting hold of that land was however, not to prove so easy, despite the much-proclaimed
abundance of available public land (i.e. ‘un-owned’) for investors.57 Investigation tended to
show that there that there was not so much ‘spare land’ after all, that is was widely used if
not occupied and that questions of customary access rights might arise. The titling theology
was revitalized; occupation needed to get transformed and certificated in ways that would not
lead to challenge of bills of sale. At the same time, interrogation as to the nature of that
customary occupancy gathered. Social justice and common and civil law principle began to
get in the way. Putting draft policy ideas out to increasingly obligatory public consultation did
not help.58 Before they knew it, policy makers were forced to examine how properties in the
public lands could be regularized from the perspective of the landholders.
Legalising custom: the quiet revolution
Investment objectives continued to be strongly catered for. Titling for market purposes
remained the cornerstone of reforms that were to emerge. This is indicative in the prominent
treatment eventually entrenched in new laws on foreigners rights to land, procedures for nonlocal and non-citizen access to land in customary areas, and widespread revision of the
meaning of compulsory acquisition of land for ‘public purpose’ to ensure this can cover
private sector development.59
The ground on which reforms are premised has shifted however in two critical ways: first, the
purpose for titling has in final reforms been somewhat rebalanced towards securitization,
many in the policy process more interested in using the process less to see rural lands
change hands than to entrench its tenure in the hands of current owners. Second, and much
more dramatically, what actually was to be titled has changed: rights are less to be converted
into statutory forms than statutory support given to customary property in its own right.
The potential positive impact upon the land security of the rural poor is enormous. Uptake
around the continent has been relatively swift. Taken as a whole, changes underway suggest
that century-long subordination of the indigenous land rights and the systems that support
them could finally become a story of the past. Unfortunately, a great deal of this
transformation still remains on the written page and even there is inchoately formed. In the
interim, ‘growth without security’ continues.
57
In Uganda, the President himself publicly invited investors to come and see for themselves
the vast lands they could acquire, and Tanzanian, Zambia and other administrations followed
suit (Alden Wily & Mbaya 2001).
58
Negrao 1999, Palmer 2000, Alden Wily & Mbaya 2001.
59
Examples in Alden Wily & Mbaya 2001.
24
V
The Framework for Reform: New National Policy and Law
Policy shifts are primarily embedded in the formulation of new national land policies and land
laws in one or other stage of formulation and entrenchment in over half of Sub-Saharan
Africa’s 40 mainland states.
Important corollary reform is occurring, the better spirit of which is driven by the
democratizing imperative.60 This is reflected in a spate of new national constitutions in Sub
Saharan Africa (around 15 since 1990) and new local government laws (over 10). Natural
resource management reform is also well underway, prompted by dramatic losses of forest
cover and species, and worldwide (and therefore donor) conservation consciousness.
Environmental, wildlife and water laws have multiplied and new forest laws especially, more
than 30 new national forest laws enacted since 1990. Without exception these make
community participation a main strategy - along with private sector promotion.61
The interrelationship among these new bodies of policies and laws is close. Key provisions
affecting customary land owners oftentimes first appear in constitutions.62 Or, more
practically, they emerge from changing resource management norms on the ground, in
general triggering local government expansion and attention to customary land norms. The
special role of community forest reserves has been noted earlier, in prompting and/or giving
practical substance to the recognition of common property as a distinct estate class.63
Facilitated local resource use agreements in Sahelian states have played an important role in
triggering local level institutional building for natural resource management, and thence land
board institutions.64 All these initiatives share important building blocks towards the
clarification of ownership and access relations at the local level, and between communities
and the State.
Though widespread, new national land policy and law development is still evolving. This has
moved barely beyond declamatory intent in a number of cases (e.g. Kenya, Zambia,
Swaziland) and is unevenly evolving in many others (e.g. Ghana, Malawi, Burundi, DRC,
Angola, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Rwanda). Significant new policies affecting customary
rights have however been finalized and entrenched in new law in around ten states (Cote
D’Ivoire, Niger, South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique, Guinea, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia
and Eritrea), and are in near-final draft in several others (e.g. Lesotho, Benin).65
An incomplete reformation
Even where new supporting law is entrenched, implementation or application of the law is
still limited. Publicity programmes about the new laws is usually the lead activity and often
the only activity, often targeted to officials. Three Regions in Ethiopia have begun to
implement certification of land occupancy with some success.66 Under Rural Land Plans in
60
Alden Wily 2000a.
Alden Wily and Mbaya 2001.
62
For example it was the Uganda Constitution, 1995 that removed ultimate state ownership of
land (with resulting effect of abolishing ‘Public Land’) and accorded all existing tenure rights
(freehold, leasehold, mailo and customary) legal status, later elaborated in the Land Act 1998.
63
Although in most cases (except The Gambia and Tanzania) this construct is first put in
place to encompass community management of resources only, demand for clarification of the
ownership of the reserve logically follows (Alden Wily 2003b).
64
Yacouba 1999, Banshaf et al. 2000, Ribot 1999, Hesse & Trench 2000, Shitarek 2001.
65
Main sources: Alden Wily & Mbaya 2001, Alden Wily 2003c.
66
Zevenbergen 2005.
61
25
Cote D’Ivoire, Benin, Guinea and Burkina Faso, local rights are similarly beginning to be
certified at community level but with yet uncertain consequence at the still-retained remote
procedure of actual registration. 67 Application of new legal terms is occurring on an erratic
basis in Mozambique (see below).
Local institution building is proceeding more swiftly in especially Francophone West Africa,
but largely not fully decentralized to community level and/or without real devolution of
authority.68 Several new district level institutions have been established to support customary
land registration in Uganda.69 Although important steps towards simplification of procedure
have been laid, this of necessity correlates with the level of institutional devolution of
controlling authority over those rights – for example, in the form of community level registers
–thus far limited as a construct to Tanzania and partially being delivered in Niger and other
Francophone and Sahelian states.70 Box 1 below gives examples of change around the
continent.
Box 1: Trends in the Treatment of Customary Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa71
Improvement in the legal status and protection of customary rights
ƒ
Customary rights may now be directly registered without conversion into introduced forms in
Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique and proposed in Lesotho and Malawi. Some customary rights
(not common property) may be so registered in Namibia (and this has been so since 1968 in
Botswana, which has led on customary registration of at least house and farm properties).
ƒ
Some or all local rights (not defined as customary rights (constitutionally abolished 1975) and
sometimes without a customary basis due to mass redistributions) held within communities (but
not necessarily with a customary basis given the formal extinction of customary tenure) may be
directly registrable in Ethiopia are advanced in carrying this out.
ƒ
Customary rights in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Benin, Cote D’Ivoire, Ghana and South Africa may
be certificated with substantial effect but with required or implied conversion into existing statutory
forms on final registration.
ƒ
Described incidents of customary rights reflect ‘customary freehold’ and/or as customarily agreed
by the modern community. Most laws allow for term in perpetuity, thus superior in this respect to
rights registered under other tenure systems in some countries (e.g. leaseholds).
ƒ
Only Tanzania and Mozambique endow customary interests with unequivocal equivalency with
imported tenure forms. Uganda proclaims similarly but encourages conversion of customary
certificates into freeholds and Lesotho and Malawi propose similarly. And Mozambique does not
practice what it preaches giving investor interest in customary lands as much support.
ƒ
The status of unregistered customary rights (90+% of all rural landholding) is often ambivalent and
continues mainly to be permissive, pending registration. Customary rights that are not registered
are most explicitly protected in Uganda, Tanzania and Mozambique. Customary owners in Cote
Ivoire have a short time limit within which their rights must be registered.
67
Stamm 2000, Chaveau 2003, Lavigne Delville 2005.
Alden Wily 2003c.
69
Adoko 2005, Hunt 2004.
70
Alden Wily 2003c.
71
Sources: Alden Wily & Mbaya 2001 and Alden Wily 2003c.
68
26
ƒ
The movement of customarily held land out of government land/public land classes has been
made most explicit in law in Uganda (where public land is abolished) and Tanzania (where it
becomes ‘village land’).
More than individual title is recognized
ƒ
Family title is quite widely provided for especially in Ethiopian law and Malawi policy.
ƒ
Adoption of procedures which limit transfers of family land without the full support of spouses is
provided in Uganda and Rwanda and proposed in Malawi and Lesotho. A presumption of spousal
co-ownership exists in Tanzania land law. Big efforts to get this into law in Uganda failed.
ƒ
Secondary rights as encumbrances to primary rights is not well provided for but with significant
development of certificated contracts in West African states, where migrant landholders have
inferior security even after generations, due to not belonging to the tribe which holds root title
(Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire).
Collective title and common properties
ƒ
A number of laws provide in principle for any ownership cluster to be recognized as the lawful
owner e.g. ‘by a person, a family unit or a group of persons recognized in the community as
capable of being a landholder’ (Tanzania, Uganda) providing various levels of collective
entitlement.
ƒ
Customary ownership of by all members of the community is widely recognized in principle but is
not able to be registered in many cases (e.g. Namibia, Botswana, Tigray/Ethiopia, Ghana).
Common property estates may be directly registered in Amhara/Ethiopia and Mozambique;
through expensive and complex mechanisms in Uganda and South Africa; and indirectly
registrable in Cote D’Ivoire and proposed in other Francophone states.
ƒ
Often the distinction between the community as land controller and owner of real property is not
clear in new policies and laws. In Mozambique collective entitlement represents more delimitation
of the area controlled by the community that shared outright ownership.
ƒ
Francophone rural land plans and mainly draft laws helpfully draw a distinction between land
managers and land owners, critical given the history in West Africa of chiefs transforming
jurisdiction and custodianship into outright ownership.
ƒ
Tanzania overcomes the problem by making distinguishing between the area over which the
community has authority and specific community owned estates within the area. Priority is put on
their registration in that no individual property may be registered until the community has defined
and registered the land it owns collectively. A simple land use plan with rules for the common
property must also be recorded. South Africa has adopted this route for application in former
homelands.
ƒ
Collective entitlement represents more delimitation of the area of community jurisdiction than
outright community ownership in most cases (Cote D’Ivoire, Mozambique). This poses problems
for locating the nature of individual rights within those domains, not always clear in policies or
laws.
Formal land administration over customary lands is devolving
ƒ
The logical need to recognize (and revitalize) customary land administration once customary rights
are recognized and need supporting is carried through into most new policies and laws. The
nature of customary regimes as community-based accords well with the current impetus towards
27
decentralized governance generally and the revival of customary tenure regimes is gaining
support from local government developments.
ƒ
Devolution of real authority to community levels is limited. Tanzania is a main exception.
ƒ
Bodies at community level are being recognized or created but most are committees advising and
assisting higher bodies which are generally government bodies or government dominated (e.g.
Botswana, Namibia, Uganda, Benin, Cote D’Ivoire, Senegal, Mali).
ƒ
Where elected community level governments exist, these are often co-opted as land authorities
(e.g. Tanzania, Lesotho, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso). Some of these bodies are only partially elected.
ƒ
Most local institutions are being remade with declining chiefly authority. In some cases chiefs are
excluded or have no representation (e.g. Tanzania, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Rwanda, Uganda). In some
they retain dominance (e.g. Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique). Mostly chiefs are advisers or carry out
minor functions reporting to higher bodies (e.g. Namibia, Botswana, Angola) or are members of
community land bodies (e.g. Malawi, Lesotho, Niger, Mali, Senegal, Benin, Cote D’Ivoire).
ƒ
Reining in rent-seeking histories or potentials by chiefs is specifically provided in newer proposals
(e.g. Malawi, Lesotho) but insufficiently managed in others (e.g. Ghana, Niger, Mozambique).
Registration of rights
ƒ
Registration of customary rights directly or in conversion is in all cases a main subject of new
policy and laws.
ƒ
While some countries make some or all customary rights directly registrable, this process is rarely
being devolved to community level. Only Tanzania provide for registration of all customary rights
at village level (Village Land Registers). Ethiopia and Uganda provide for part of the process at
sub-district level, Namibia and Botswana at district level, also proposed in Lesotho and Malawi.
Registration of customary rights in Ghana and Mozambique is through a central register at
provincial level.
ƒ
District level bodies are generally arms of central government and accountable upwards rather
than to communities (Niger, Burkina Faso). Others are legally autonomous but still accountable
upwards through other mechanisms (Botswana, Uganda).
ƒ
Accountability of community or parish level bodies and especially chiefs to community members is
not well elaborated.
ƒ
Simplification of registration is occurring only where the registers are at sub-district (e.g. Uganda,
Ethiopia) or especially community level (Tanzania).
ƒ
Procedures towards registration are being widely devolved to local committees but they do not
have the power to actually register the rights (Benin, Cote D’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Ghana,
Namibia, Botswana, South Africa). This includes adjudication and community based mapping of
boundaries (e.g. Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Guinea).
ƒ
Mapping requirements are reduced where registration is devolved (e.g. Tanzania, Uganda, Mali,
Niger).
ƒ
Reluctance to abandon cadastral survey correlates with formal encouragement to private sector
roles in these spheres (e.g. Ghana, South Africa, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia).
The central issue of the value of a customary land right
28
Registration of rural land rights remains the dominant instrument and is a main subject in
new land laws. The real change lies in what can be registered, best exemplified in the new
land classes of Customary Right of Occupancy and Certificate of Customary Ownership.
Without this, reformism would amount to little more than an activation and extension of the
arm of the state in its efforts to capture occupation and land use into its own systems.
A highly important facilitating advantage in the Africa context is that most customary
landholders in practice retain dominant occupancy and use over at least residual but still
often substantial customary lands, albeit on a permissive basis. (There are exceptions
among which the loss of customary rights and real property has been particularly
pronounced in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Sudan). This limits for most
governments the discouraging implications towards mass restitution involving removal of
non-customary right-holders or other mechanisms such as payment of compensation.
It also suggests that great progress may be made simply by changing the law to upgrade the
permissive status of that customary occupancy to status as ownership rights – in short,
liberating customary tenure from landlordism by the state. This is precisely what has
occurred in Uganda, Tanzania and Mozambique.72 Legally speaking, the poor in these three
countries now have no insecurity of tenure. This sets these countries somewhat apart from
others where the routes to this status are circuitous (e.g. South Africa, Ghana) or the
promised integrity of customary interests as private property is incomplete (e.g. Cote
D’Ivoire, Niger), such as still denying common properties the status of registrable real estate
as collectively owned private property (e.g. Botswana, Tigray/Ethiopia, Namibia, Rwanda).
Knowing who owns what is still essential
Of course even in the ‘model’ states above the reality on the ground is not as rosy. Legal
declamation has its limits, even where popular dissemination takes place. Threats to
practical security abound from within and without. Women continue to be main losers in intrahousehold land dispute, even where their right to share in decision-making is assured in
statute.73 Unregulated expansion of farming into community lands continues, often by elites
within the community in alliance with leaders, and reinforces the need for more democratic
and accountable customary governance reform. The more serious threat however derives
from outside the community, shortly discussed.
Whatever the source, level of certainty of ownership invariably correlates with level of threat.
Certainty is high in respect of house plots and farms, given the lesser scale and clear
boundaries. Social certainty around common properties is much lower, due to their
expansive dimensions and because, as elaborated earlier, their status as locally-owned has
been so severely undermined by their wholesale characterization as ‘public lands’. It is this
lack of certainty that makes ripe for elite capture from within and from without.
Rights certification in some form is inescapable
It also illustrates why clarification of owners and boundaries and entrenchment of the results
in one form or another have such a role to play in customary tenure securitization, and why
titling is such a main subject of reform. The issues that now confront the process are not if
such formalization of certainty of tenure has utility, but how it should be established, with
what level of technical requirement (and especially survey), and with what levels of written
72
73
And which has been the case in Botswana for some time in respect of houses and farms.
See Adoko 2005 for excellent examples of this in Apac District, Uganda.
29
recordation. Even more central questions are in whose hands should guarantee of security
rest, and upon which types of property should securitization be first focused?
Review of emerging norms thus far suggests few of these questions are being answered
innovatively and that classically-conceived entitlement of the 1950s is still very much in
place, both limiting real devolution of authority over land matters to local levels and failing to
target those customary estates at most risk. Conclusions on this are drawn below.
30
VI
The Need to Assure Success
Given the extraordinary speed and uptake of a commitment to limit insecurity of rural tenure
in Sub-Saharan Africa, it would be churlish to upbraid governments for the slowness with
which this is being delivered outside of fundamental constraints which inhibit sound evolution
in the commitment itself or the manner is which it may be concretely delivered. In this respect
four key constraints impede genuine reform and achievement v. Unresolved policy contradictions arising from the dominance of land market
promotion objectives over and above mass securitisation of tenure;
vi. Related, sustained justification of securitisation for the purpose of collateralisation,
thereby narrowing its target and design more to what lenders need (or think they
need) than necessary for majority interests, and particularly those of the poor, to be
practically and swiftly secured;
vii. Still incomplete understanding of customary rights and their embedded systems,
producing cloudy strategies; and
viii. Poor process, insufficiently grounded in the local and the practical in reform making
and application, preventing necessary ‘out of the box’ strategising to overcome
chronic constraints, the adoption of the commonsensical over the conventional, or
departure from entrenched norms known to have limited resonance in the majority
rural poor environment.
Rights and the market
Examples of the interrelated effects are not difficult to find. After the first flush of social
justification, early market interest in the customary estate tends to resurge, and begin to
suggest that real ‘growth with equity’ may be as difficult to achieve in Africa as elsewhere.74
In Mozambique for example, where much is made of the legal validity and protection of
customary rights under the new land law of 1997, this was accompanied (and indeed
triggered) by the introduction of local consultation exercises to enable communities to
indicate where a proposed land concession to a non-local person or foreigner will interfere
with their own occupation and use, at once indicating where the balance of interest is
presumed to lie. This is coming to fruition with a paucity of documented community
consultation, fairly routine cooption of local notables to approve investor applications to use
customary land, and increasingly, use of the fact that there is nothing in the law that requires
government to not allocate the land if it is found to be occupied or used by communities.75
While procedures have since been introduced to enable communities to at least delimit the
areas they do not want interfered with, this is in practice only undertaken where NGO or
other external facilitation and funds are available, due to the high costs of formal survey and
demarcation still required. The result by end 2004 was some 10,000 or more approved
investor applications over sometimes vast expanses of communal property, while only 180
communities have managed to demarcate their claimed domains.76
In Uganda, state encroachment into the common properties of local communities is also not
uncommon a decade after the landmark constitutional recognition of the legality of customary
74
See Borras, Kay & Lodhi 2005.
Norfolk & Liversage 2002, Hanlon 2002.
76
Oxfam 2005a.
75
31
interests as private property, registered or not. Thus while thousands of Acholi in the north of
Uganda have been forced to linger in protected camps around towns against threatened
incursions by the rebel Lords Resistance Army, survey and development of their ‘abandoned’
lands are allegedly underway to provide government, army and related private sector
interests scope for logging, and commercial farming and ranch enterprise.77
Even in Tanzania, identified as providing perhaps most explicit protection of customary
rights, comparable state-supported encroachment into unfarmed commonage periodically
occurs,78 together with more formal coercion upon village authorities to surrender land for
foreign investment, now proudly deposited in a growing Land Bank for investors.79
In these and in other cases, the notion of ‘un-owned’ land, set aside during policy-making
periods as largely a figment of imagination (“all land is owned”) is seeing resurgence. Lack of
real assistance to communities to define and record the boundaries of their respective
customary domains (village or community land areas) has contributed, adding to still limited
awareness that the law itself supports their interests in this respect.80 Meanwhile in both
Uganda and Tanzania, some knowledgeable officials and elites within communities are
making good use of the weakness of local level institution building around customary
interests to themselves expand into these areas while they can.81
Limiting what is titled and how to what lenders want
While as shown earlier, the individual-centric collateralization driver in current reforms has
not entirely prevented emergence of new opportunities for family and other collective
entitlements, it does still hamper needed evolution in these areas and in relation to how
derivative rights are identified and their attributes entrenched. Important developments
protecting especially the rights of wives are emerging, either through a presumption of
spousal co-ownership (Tanzania), the requirement that the consent of all spouses is obtained
and recorded prior to disposal of primary land (Uganda) and distinct registration of men and
women’s land shares (Eritrea, Ethiopia).82
At the same time, market interests still impede; this has played an explicit role in preventing a
presumption of spousal co-ownership in Uganda and continued resistance to amendment of
Kenya’s Registered Land Act, even after several decades of an extraordinary level of dispute
clogging up the courts, stemming from the exclusion of the rights of family members and
particularly wives at registration.83 As suggested before, there also remains insufficient
construct development to more precisely express the real rights of women in land, which are
generally more than just a right of access and somewhat less than primary ownership.
Keeping the focus on the house and farm at the expense of the commons
Development of norms to better reflect wider contexts for collective ownership are particularly
inchoate. Essential distinctions between collective tenure for the purposes of shared
jurisdiction over the land, and collective tenure as a real property interest remain blurred.
Many reforms simply do not yet unpack the complexities. Some laws provide for a
77
Adoko & Levine 2004, Oxfam 2005b.
Nelson 2005, Gayewi 2005.
79
Oxfam Ireland, Trocaire and Concern 2005.
80
Alden Wily 2003d.
81
Adoko 2005, Oxfam 2005b. Oxfam Ireland, Trocaire and Concern 2005.
82
See Alden Wily 2003c for details.
83
Rugadya and Busingye (eds.) 2002, Kameri-Mbote 2005.
78
32
community to register an entire community as collectively owned (e.g. Mozambique) without
clarifying the implications for individual or family-held properties as to whether this diminishes
those rights and how these should be described. Conveniently this is left up to owners to
determine ‘in accordance with custom’. While this is all to the well and good in theory, it
raises queries as much for modern customary land holders when they attempt to order their
rights as is does for strategists and the courts.
In the interim, inattention to the common persists, despite abundant historical and current
evidence that the insecurity of tenure most afflicts these properties and that moreover, these
properties have special importance to the poor (see later). Not unrelated is the equally
infrequently answered question of exactly how community based jurisdiction over customary
lands is defined and entrenched. In most countries, the titling for the market orthodoxy keeps
the focus upon the individual estate, and limits real attention to the necessity of helping
communities define their spheres of jurisdiction and entrench new and more effective
governance regimes at community level.
Mortgaging the commons has untapped potential
Nor does this individual focus in any event serve needed evolution in the titling for investment
orthodoxy itself. For, ironically, the commons could have more viable mortgaging potential
than the family house or farm. This is because owning communities could mortgage one part
of their often substantial common properties and at no risk to their individual properties
should foreclosure be administered (and where smaller and shorter term loans through other
mechanisms may anyway be more viable).
The risks of excluding the poor from opportunity and benefit from common property
mortgaging would also be more easily avoided. Loans could be raised for income-generating
activities of benefit to the whole community, and among which eco-tourism developments
already show returns.84 Or a community could raise a loan on one productive part of its
woodland in order to install a community-owned and managed maize grinding mill or
borehole, the loan repaid through user fees, proportionately mainly paid by wealthier families
as the larger users. Power 2003 provides some interesting and equally workable potentials
within the clan land context of Papua New Guinea. Such potentials rest however of political
and legal acknowledgement and ideally practical entrenchment that the area concerned is
the common property of the community and not undefined possible public or government
land estate.
Titling for collateralization is becoming more poverty-focused …
Within the individual focus, there has been an interesting dispersion of sub-focus in both a
negative and positive sense.
On the one hand titling for mortgaging has gained a new direction in its shift away from the
better-off farmer (the ‘progressive farmer’ of the 1950s and 1960s who had to be encouraged
to not just invest in his farm buy out less productive neighbours) to the genuinely poor –
although in mainly urban settings.
The De Soto thesis contributes significantly to this in its visionary faith that even the smallest
parcel of land or squatter occupation may be turned into gold if only the legal title required by
banks to loan money can be acquired. The alleged limited real demonstration of this
84
Mogaka et al. 2001.
33
consequence even outside Sub Saharan Africa need not directly concern us here.85 In Africa,
the Institute of which he is director, has set out to demonstrate this in the city of Dar es
Salaam in Tanzania where the government project it supports has remarkably swiftly
registered 60,000 ‘poor’ squatter homes and expects to register another 40,000 by the end of
2006.86 87
… but also more investor centred
On the other hand, there are as strong contradictory signs of a policy shift in the focus of
mortgaging away from the poor (or less poor) smallholder to the investor who procures his
property in the market place. This is again well illustrated in Tanzania where cutting edge
mortgage provisions in the new land law have been abandoned precisely because they are
seen by private investors to interfere with their freedom to foreclose on poor borrowers.88
Innovative provision for small mortgages precisely shaped around the needs of poor farmers
and urban dwellers has also been abandoned. The effects, McAuslan writes, are that the
urban middle and upper classes will benefit by the new arrangements and the poor will lose
out (2005).
Limiting the devolutionary course of reform
The focus on titling for borrowing also contributes to limited real decentralization of the
process or abandonment of expensive tools. As illustrated in Box 1, there have been
modifications and concessions. Landholders are clearly to be more involved in early
procedures like adjudication, and some of them already are actively doing so on a trial basis
or otherwise (e.g. Cote D’Ivoire, Benin). In exceptional cases customary communities are
empowered to conduct those processes entirely themselves with more external facilitation
than supervision (e.g. Ethiopia, Mali). In Tanzania the register itself becomes a village
register, managed entirely at village level.
The more dominant trend has been to retain the assumed sanctity of classical entitlement by
adopting a two-stage process, the first providing for local level certification procedure,
producing low-grade ‘titles’ which may later be converted (or must be so converted to gain
status as private rights in some cases) into ‘final titles’ on the basis of formal survey and
registration, thereby raising cost and administration and limiting mass opportunity.89
Agricultural investors sustain the pressure. Thus in Ethiopia, perfectly serviceable and rapidly
expanding local level titling developed in recent reforms has been deemed by central policy
makers ‘not good enough for collateralization purposes’, and now subject to formal survey
which neither local administrations nor landholders can afford.90
85
Cousins et al. 2005.
Ministry of Lands and Human Settlements in Oxfam Ireland et al. 2005.
87
There are unconfirmed allegations that this was achieved only through bypassing the
rigorous adjudication procedures laid down in new land law (1999) to prevent wrongful
dispossession of especially women and the very, very poor at registration (Oxfam et al. 2003).
88
Reference is made here to Chapter 10 of the Land Act 1999 and the Land (Amendment) Act
2004. Refer Mutakyamilwa 2005 for detailed documentation of the debate towards legal
amendment and McAuslan 2005 for commentary.
89
This is the case in one version or another in Ghana, Rwanda, Angola, Namibia, Cote
D’Ivoire and Uganda and suggested in draft law in Lesotho, Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso.
Adams & Turner 2005, Chauveau 2003, Oxfam 2005a, Oxfam 2005b. Oxfam Ireland et
86
al.2005.
90
Zevenbergen 2005.
34
The instrument of formal survey is particularly obstructive to ‘out of the box’ thinking. Even in
Tanzania, where the Village Land Act, 1999 specifically makes it possible for definition of
community domains (Village Land Areas) to be reflected in Certificates of Village Land on the
basis of detailed agreement and description of the boundary by concerned communities, this
has given way to administrative insistence that only formal survey is good enough.91 This is
despite the long experience of villages in this matter that only it is the detailed on-site
negotiation process as to boundaries and resulting as detailed description that entrenches
them, not maps or coordinates which cannot be re-found on the ground without rental of GPS
units or hire of surveyors.92 Experience in central Sudan is similar.93 It also resonates with
earlier noted experience in Kenya that the process of adjudication can be more important as
a source of certainty than resulting documentation.
Common sense and continued failures suggest that continued promotion of first world
systems of evidence of ownership and transaction is indefensible. Nonetheless, the search
for more widely-applicable ways of implementing formal survey continues.94 This inhibits
identification and upgrading of sources of certainty that are more socially-embedded and
localized, and the adoption of which do not involve a shift in the centre of control over this
certainty away from landholders to the centre. Another consequence has been to divert
attention away from the more fundamental question of whether the cadastre really does
provide the security of tenure needed at the local level or is more an act of faith.
Demystifying customary tenure
Customary tenures still present conceptual challenges (for not just policy planners but
academics) that also help limit real change in widespread rural poor land insecurity.
Most of the issues at stake relate to the ordering of rights without loss of nuance. Often
‘custom’ gets in the way to the extent that ‘what was’ gets inflated at the cost of ‘what is’ the
norm today – or indeed, what should be the norm for justice and protection of rights to be
achieved. The more empowered a chief through past and recent transitions, the more likely it
is his that he encourages adherence to tradition, where this is to his own benefit, and where
democratic reassessment of norms by the modern community may threaten this.95 Inter alia,
a fixation on rules has fairly routinely also sent policy makers up the blind alley of
codification, entrenching relations that may not be fair or advantageous to the modern
customary community.
Not seeing the wood for the trees
Academic investigation into the nature of customary rights does not always help. In the
dedicated pursuit of ‘customary truth’ a research rather than facilitation approach may get
tied up in knots and tie the system they study up in knots, compounding the notion that
customary tenure is too complex to get to grips with it and therefore too difficult to entrench.
This helps defeat what must be the primary objective, to assist modern community members
to arrive at norms acceptable and useful to the majority, and in sufficiently comprehensible
91
Ministry of Lands and Human Settlements in Oxfam Ireland et al. 2005.
Alden Wily 2003b, 2003d.
93
Alden Wily forthcoming.
94
Augustinus & Deininger 2005.
95
Reported in one respect or another to be the case in Malawi, Lesotho, South Africa, Ghana,
Mali, Niger and probably others (see Adams & Turner 2005, Oxfam 2005a, Oxfam 2005b,
Lavigne Delville 2005).
92
35
form to be easily operated and entrenched within the community and enforceable upon those
from beyond the community who access their lands.
Seeing the wood for the trees
A commonsense aid to this is to get the focus right in the first instance, by not losing sight of
what was described earlier as the single unchanging template of customary land tenure
everywhere it is practiced: that it is a system for ordering and regulating land access at and
by the community level, and only persists for as long as the living community endorses the
resulting norms and practices.
Viewed this way, the location of the modern, living community as the arbiter of rules or
customs is logical, and necessary. It also helps understanding customary tenure as an
operating governance system and opens the way to considerations of good governance;
aiding its adherents to arrive at processes which are sufficiently inclusive, democratic and
accountable in their constitution to retain popular adherence in a modernizing world. As
Adams and Turner remark, it may be ‘necessary for tenure reform to catch up with tenure
reality on the ground’ (2005).
It also enables the rules or laws to be located in their proper place as no more than
instruments of community will. Those that are unserviceable to the majority membership (the
rural poor) are rightfully done away with, as are those customs which have demonstrably
failed to award equity and justice or protection of rights to sub-sectors.
As example, the common tradition of chiefs freely allocating (increasingly for fees)
unoccupied community lands to any asking newcomer who seems nice enough or to those
from within the community who have most means to cultivate those lands, may have to give
way to new ‘customs’ that first consider if there is even enough land for existing community
members and their children to cultivate and whether expansion of cultivation should be
halted altogether where precious wooded commonage or pasture is dwindling.
Custom need statute to more than permissively exist
The above discussion highlights other confusions in the complex relationship of statutory and
customary law. Common-sense suggests the two systems are not an either-or but
inseparably linked. The last century has painfully demonstrated that customary rights nested
in a larger state context need that state level protection (i.e. statutory or national law) to be
more than acknowledged, but actually secured.
Sorting out the relations between customary law and statutory law in useful and fair
ways
The status of the rules by which a social community chooses to govern those rights - i.e. the
actual customs or laws - is less straightforward once they are made equal in force as
provisions about land in national laws, such as current reforms is availing. The historical
strategy of avoiding conflict between the two regimes by keeping them geographically
separate still has utility but is decreasingly foolproof as statutory interests gather in
customary domains (usually rural) and where, less commonly, custom may dominate in
some urban areas.96 The need for continued integration of basic principles at one level of
96
This mainly occurs where actively administrating chiefs have refused to have their authority
or the rights they supervise subordinated to national authority or statutory tenure regulation
and gain constitutional support for this due to historical recognition of the primacy of traditional
36
another is easier to see when a third regime is added to the equation, such as in the case of
mailo tenure in Uganda (a proto-feudal system developed in the 1900s) or more widely,
where religious land rules apply, widely the case in Islamic states, given that Shari’a has a
great deal to say about how property is owned and transacted.
A degree of reordering will always be required, and appropriately preoccupies jurists. In
different ways Okoth-Ogendo and McAuslan argue for the dominance of customary land law
where it exists (most of rural Africa). Okoth-Ogendo recommends that customary law needs
to be raised above received law in the hierarchy of applicable laws and that the courts should
be required not just to “be guided by it” where inter-system dispute, arises but “to apply it”.
This would, he says –
“eliminate the tendency to hop in and out of foreign law on grounds that the
application of customary law is inappropriate in certain contexts” (2001).
McAuslan puts the case more bluntly:
“Customary tenure is – and always has been – one of the foundational elements of
the land laws of all states in Africa. It is not an add-on to received law; indeed
received or imposed law is the add-on. Received law thus needs to be adapted and
adjusted to indigenous law” (2005).
Distinguishing between administrative domain and real property
Conceptual and structural problems relating to the status and treatment of collective rights
under customary tenure have been touched upon above. Drawing a distinction between
communal domains as implying community jurisdiction and common properties as indicating
real estate owned by that community, has been argued as useful to unravelling some of
these.
Distinguishing between root ownership by the community and real property
ownership
In cases where collective ownership of an entire community area is meant as outright
community ownership, the issue is more complex. In order not to diminish property rights
held at the sub-community levels by individuals, families and clans, it is helpful to conceive of
community tenure as symbolical root title. However this has echoes with the radical title to
the soil that sovereignty endows. It also runs afoul of the fact that in so many African
countries, the state has made itself ultimate owner of all property rights (a matter of property,
not sovereignty).
Still, in unpacking and ordering their collective land interests, it is again behoven upon
customary communities to devise new and more exact constructs that reflect these different
levels of ownership as they themselves perceive it. Such considerations will be important in
gradually democratizing this fundamental element of property rights, leading to the eventual
surrender of ultimate title by the state in favour of citizens or groups of citizens like
communities, such as achieved thus far only in Uganda (1995).
Boundaries do exist and do matter
tenure in those areas – often the case in peri-urban areas and small towns in Ghana (Alden
Wily & Hammond 2001).
37
That customary regimes typically include overlapping interests is a well-established fact.
Where these are multiple, it sometimes seems easier to policy makers and development
workers to assume that boundaries do not exist or are too fluid to identify and to instead
advocate rational and fairer management regulation of access – and leave ownership up to
government.97
Such positions flourish in respect of arid lands like the Sahel where mobile pastoralism
dominates and where several groups may share ownership of one resource or one part of a
resource, or share rights to another domain, otherwise owned by a settled community.98 It
may also be the case such as in the former homelands where through years of malign
dumping policies, old rights and new rights may be intensively over-layered.99
Where access is accepted as entirely fair and equitably managed, and under no threat at all
from external forces, it may be safe to not assist those residing within the area to clarify their
respective interests. However, it rare to find a situation where these conditions apply.
97
Which it may anyway have assumed for itself – frequently the case in respect of arid lands,
such as throughout the Sahel including Sudan and Ethiopia.
98
Mwangi & Dohrn 2005.
99
Cousins 2005b.
38
Unpacking even the most layered of rights is an essential instrument of securitisation
for the poor
Certainly this rarely applies in the semi-arid and arid areas of Sub Saharan Africa, where
those same spaces are highly vulnerable to wrongful encroachment and even outright
appropriation for other purposes, and where ‘battling for space’ among nomad groups and
especially between nomads and settled peoples is heavily underwritten by not just contested
access but by the state’s habit mentioned earlier of equalising ownership rights with access
rights in the process of co-opting ownership for itself.100 Moreover early experience in
attempting such clarification in both Sudan and Afghanistan suggest that contesting rightholders are themselves extremely keen to see and participate in adjudicated resolution.101
Such external pressures may be minimal in cases like the former South African homelands
where the greater customary domain is so precisely delimited, but where it appears that land
grabbing by elites is significant enough to warrant the same kind of rights clarification in order
for especially those of poorer people to be secured and entrenched. To avoid these crucial
issues could be to play into the hands of not just elites or the stronger parties affected, but
into the hands of those who would prefer to see customary tenure self-destruct, thus
confirming the wisdom of the State’s capture of primary ownership of its lands in the first
place.
Condemning land reform to the ills of master planning
Finally there are constraints not of substance but of development strategy associated with
current land reform in Africa. Planning shortfalls abound, resulting in often unrealistic policies
that will either never, or only at immense cost and difficulty, see application or
implementation.102 Poor process has also generated its fair share of strategic and paradigm
shortfalls, with replay of demonstrably inadequate or inappropriate remedies to mass
insecurity, many of which have been addressed in this paper. Perhaps most pernicious of all
is where process towards reform has been poor enough to fail to sustain initial goodwill or
political will to really get to grips with endemic tenure insecurity among the poor.
Even ahead of final policy or law making the last is evident. The much-proclaimed promise in
the Peace Agreement (January 2005) and subsequent Interim Constitution to provide better
legal protection for customary land rights in Sudan have already been downgraded in the two
States
where its terms are being tested and have widely been abrogated in the practice
elsewhere.103 Commitment to local level empowerment in land decision-making is quite
frequently truncated by governments unwilling to really surrender the extent of authority
initially promised (seen in Uganda, Rwanda, Angola, South Africa and Niger).
Slow-down or even halt to new land policy development and law on variously spurious
grounds is also not unknown, recently the case in Lesotho, DRC, Swaziland, Angola and
Zambia. Notably, these retrenchments have in each case been at least partly driven by fears
that private enterprise development may be constrained by protective provisions for
customary owners.104
100
Alden Wily forthcoming.
Alden Wily 2005a, Alden Wily 2004.
102
E.g. see Hunt 2004 for the oft-exampled case of Uganda.
103
Alden Wily forthcoming.
104
Oxfam 2005a, Oxfam 2005b, Adams & Turner 2005.
101
39
Implementation of already approved policies is similarly affected. Insufficient funding and
dwindling political commitment have famously dogged South African and Namibia reforms
with less than one percent of land returned thus far in the former, and only one commercial
farm redistributed in the latter.105 At war, implementation delays in Eritrea and Cote D’Ivoire
are perhaps more excusable – although the causes notable for being land rights wars, the
former played out at territorial level.
The Effects
The limitations upon what is basically a praiseworthy and exciting reform movement are
many. Some of the more general effects being felt include ƒ
Continued and even increasing vulnerability of unoccupied customary lands – the
commonage – to wrongful attrition and appropriation, and to the jeopardy of the rights
and livelihood of the poor;
ƒ
Shortfalls in new paradigm development, less than needed reforms to really make a
difference;
ƒ
Lack of engagement among those to whom land tenure reform matters most, the
majority rural poor;
ƒ
Growing divides among what policy promises, law entrenches and what occurs on the
ground; and flagging political will and rising popular disenchantment - and conflict.
VII Reaching Towards Remedy: A More Poverty Focused and Developmentally-
Sound Approach
Two simple shifts in strategy could help: first, restructuring rural land reform in strict
accordance with prioritisation of levels of threat to the security of the rural poor, and second,
pursuing this and land reform in general through a more devolved and landholder-driven
approach. This is necessary to generate the focused and action-based approach that is
required to ensure relevance and relief.
Both will have the effect of bringing the security of common properties to the centre of rural
land reform. Good governance in land rights will also of necessity be a more direct objective,
conduit and output of change.
The commons really do matter to the poor
While urbanisation rates are rising globally and especially in Africa, it is also a fact that per
capita farm size falling, estimated as around half what it was in the 1960.106 While the
profound inequities in farmland distribution in many Asian states is absent in Africa,107 it
remains a fact that poorer a rural household, the smaller his or her farm. Given the orthodoxy
of land abundance in Africa, it is probably less well acknowledged that outright landlessness
and near-landlessness in respect of cultivable land grows on the sub-continent. Around one
105
Oxfam 2005b.
Jayne et al. 2003, based on research in Ethiopia, Kenya and Zambia.
107
Lastarria-Cornhiel & Melmed Sanjak 1999.
106
40
quarter of rural households in five African states were found to be farm landless or nearlandless in 2003 and research in other countries confirms the trend.108 What do seem to be
more plentiful are lands that are broadly uncultivable by peasant farmers, either because of
their character and especially their dryness and absence of potable drinking water, and their
remoteness - or because of their importance for other purposes.
These are the natural forests, rangelands and woodlands, desert and non-desert pastures,
the hilltops and swamplands of Sub-Saharan Africa; a significant proportion of which have
been lost to communities use and/or tenure over the last century as variously state controlled
reserves,109 commercial farming or livestock schemes and mineral development, and to a
great deal of reallocation to non-customary shareholders – local and foreign entrepreneurs.
We know that the residual common properties contribute in enormous ways to the livelihood
of all rural dwellers who have access to them, and especially to the very poor.110 We know for
example that in Zimbabwe some 35 percent of total rural household income derived from
common woodlands alone (even prior to the current sharp decline in cash incomes)111 that
the poorer the household the greater the ratio of dependency upon common resources (e.g.
up to 75 percent in Zambia) and that women and the farmland poor are particularly
dependent.112 We also know, as this paper has illustrated, that many of the greater economic
values of the rural commons continue to accrue to governments and private enterprise rather
than to their customary owners, and can guess that this is a contributing factor in the
persistence of legal and political unclarity as to their real possessors.
It is this, as well as the worrying attrition of these critical assets of the rural poor, that makes
it essential to better address the crumbling fate of the commons. Forest and woodland, a
major category of common property, now disappears at a mean rate of five million hectares
annually.113 Uncalculated loss of un-wooded pasturage could double total losses.
The need to secure the capital assets of the poor
It has been a core thesis of this paper that the uncertain ownership status of the commons
lays at the root of the problem. This, it has been shown, has origins or support in muddled
thinking about how commonage is customarily owned and the socio-institutional context in
which it is embedded. It has been argued that sustenance of such positions has been
purposive or at least convenient to state-making and government agendas. It manifests
today – and not just in Africa, but worldwide – in overlap of ownership interests by people
and state.114
The unresolved contradictions in current reformism reflect this, and in which the balance of
favour remains upon private investment and supporting governments; and to whom the
unoccupied or uncultivated customary commonage increasingly – and correctly suggests –
untapped wealth that needs to be captured and activated.
108
Ibid.
Several hundred million ha; see FAO 2003b.
110
FAO 2003b.
111
Mogaka et al. 2001.
112
Emerton 2001.
113
FAO 2003b.
114
For example, governments and communities in both Sudan and Afghanistan claim
ownership under different legal systems of respectively around 150 and 50 million hectares of
semi-arid or arid pasture and woodlands, a longstanding irritant to ethnic relations and civil
war (Alden Wily 2004, Alden Wily forthcoming).
109
41
Ensuring that that wealth is captured in the hands of their traditional and rightful owners,
must become a more central focus of reform.
The wealth-generating potentials are indisputable, extending far beyond the important
product values already enjoyed by communities and which need to be secured rather than
permissively enjoyed. From time to time some of these potentials are already being realized;
such as at the rural-urban interface in those still rare occasions where poorer community
shareholders of common estates manage to gain a fair share in sharply rising property
values, not entirely captured by land buyers or self-rewarding community leaders; an
opportunity that cannot be realized however without clarification and recognition from both
within and outside the community that the real estate involved is community property, neither
the private property of the chief nor of government.115
Without having to sell the estate or part thereof, the potential returns to common property
ownership from rental, product licensing (including up and coming bio-prospecting for
medicinal and other commercially valuable products) and concession issue are immense.
Should retention of natural forest (and not just replanting) earn carbon credits in future as
being proposed, communities which are formally recognized as owners could gain a rightful
share of credits and be assisted to sell these accordingly.116 Mortgaging for communitybased enterprise and development, structured to ensure minimal intra-community elite
capture, has been mentioned above.
However, before any of this can be achieved or is even worth pursuing, the real tenure of
community ownership over the commonage needs to be formally established. The practical
implementation of this should become a programmatic priority.
Getting the process right
Not all the onus of reform lies upon the state. As routinely the case across successful social
change, and evidentially evolving in many other parts of the customary world,117
empowerment of the community and within the community is an essential building block.
In the Africa context this is best and most simply contexted in the prioritization of reform
processes which assist communities towards orderly and managed changed of their land
relations, both internally and with the outside world. In practical terms, this logically begins
with assisted definition of spheres of community jurisdiction and the establishment of an
institutional foundation for executing community based authority, followed up by clear
identification of common estates within the domain and the establish of rules by which it will
in future be accessed and regulated.
To date some of the most important reform developments begin to take precisely these
steps, albeit generally with the resulting paradigms far from structurally clear or yet confirmed
that they will be legally entrenched.118
115
Beginning to be seen in Ghana (see Alden Wily & Hammond 2001).
Santilli et al. 2005.
117
Such as in the growing success of indigenous communities in Latin America in securing
shares of existing agribusiness and concessions on lands over which their collective rights
have now been recognised (Griffiths 2001).
118
Main reference is made here to the Rural Land Plan model of Francophone Africa, under
implementation in Guinea, Burkina Faso, Benin and Cote D’Ivoire (see Chauveau 2003,
Lavigne Delville 2005) and to a customary land securitization procedure underway in central
116
42
Box 2 provides a generic outline of practical process. Experience thus far suggests the
results will be on the whole straightforward, delivering discrete but adjoining community
domains, and within which community real estate (common properties) are precisely
definable on the ground - and in the process practically defined. In more arid pastoral zones,
shared ownership by several social communities may be the norm, and/or nested with
acknowledged oversight by the most settled of these communities.
The challenge to new norm creation may at times be considerable and will almost certainly
centre upon new tenure constructs which allow for nuanced distinctions among collective
rights; distinguishing for example between the collective ‘root commonhold’ of the community
and ‘estate commonhold’ to reflect different levels and/or manifestation of community
ownership, beyond the easier distinction between community as land manager and
community as land owner.
Heated inter-community and intra-community negotiation can be fully expected and a
required task of facilitating agencies including government is to keep this at communitymanageable levels. Experience thus far suggests that not only may this may be successfully
achieved in nine times out of ten, but that the action of inter-community negotiation and
agreement is highly empowering in entrenching clarity of tenure (“our land”) and in the
activation of community governance over the domain secured.
The essentiality of involving all interest holders goes without saying. In zones where
significant pastoral seasonal rights of access apply, the support of these groups is needed,
and in the process affords an opportunity to renegotiate and entrench agreed access rules.
Devising appropriate legal constructs to reflect community dominion, and ensuring that intercommunity decisions as to boundaries may be formally entrenched (registered) at accessible
levels (no higher than district or county), is an additional task of facilitating policy.
Shifts beyond what was traditionally the case into what is agreed as today required will
occur, in order to reflect changing community composition and settlement patterns. This will
commonly be the case where communal jurisdiction has, for one reason or another, been
significantly weakened, dismantled or reshaped.
Community-based ordering and entrenchment of customary rights of access will be a logical
part of the procedure, purposively identified and embedded by community members.
Formulation of regulatory community based management of common properties as logically
follows, and for which, on the African continent, there is a wealth of operating experience.119
Through such action-based change, more than lip-service is paid to popular empowerment
and the adoption of bottom-up approaches in both planning reforms and their application. It
means beginning at the periphery, in the rural community, and through facilitated learning by
doing and local institution-building, arriving at relevant tenure norms and governance
procedures that are fully own-able in concept and practice by communities themselves, and
thereby also easily replicable at scale.
This paper has argued that all the necessary tools are in place. Customary tenure is already
premised on a community based foundation, and provides an ideal framework within which
Sudan (Alden Wily 2005a, 2005b and forthcoming). Delimitation procedure in Mozambique is
relevant to the first of the three main steps: identifying the domain and entrenching community
tenure (see Norfolk & Liversage 2002 and Hanlon 2002).
119
See Alden Wily & Mbaya 2001 for documented examples and Alden Wily 2003b.
43
and through which to promote and guide change. Many of the conceptual conundrums facing
policy makers in their understanding of customary regimes will be relatively easily and
pragmatically resolved in the hands of customary landholders themselves. And through local
ownership of changes, the poor will be better able to protect their interests and popular will
be better able to drive and engage political will, usually transient once words need to be put
into practice.
44
Box 2: A Simple Ten Step Process towards Customary Tenure Security
1. Following determination of interest, a technical facilitator calls representatives of rural communities
to a meeting to decide the basis upon which they will identify and operate their customary
domains, with a village basis generally preferred.
2. A representative boundary committee from each community is formed. Each works with
neighbouring committees to agree the exact location of their shared boundary. This is done by
walking every step of the boundary and recording the description agreed by the two committees.
Expert facilitation is available to promote compromises. GPS readings are taken to enable maps
to be produced. It is the detailed boundary description however that is put before full community
meetings for their approval.
3. Where the customary domain has been routinely used by outsiders (e.g. pastoralists) with
acknowledged customary access rights to products or areas, these outsiders are consulted and
their support secured. In the process these access rights are renegotiated to clarify their nature as
access, not ownership rights and to establish a new management regime agreeable to both
parties. Their representation on the council below is essential.
4. Each community is assisted to form a community land council (with seasonal user representation
as appropriate) to serve both as trustee owner of the root title of the domain on behalf of the
community and as the local land authority over the domain, responsible for zoning, regulation of
access and land use, procedures for transfer and the establishment in due course of simple
registers of ownership and transaction of properties within the domain. Community members
determine beforehand how they want the council constituted, with what proportion of elected and
traditional leadership and the procedures through which land councillors will be accountable to
itself and how decisions will be implemented. Annual training of land councillors is useful,
gradually increasing their capacity and scope of their administrative mandate.
5. Policy and legal support is secured, ideally founded upon at least a reasonable degree of trial
implementation in the field, to ensure that legal constructs and procedures will be workable and
easily replicated and sustained. New legislation may outline how customary land authorities
operate and provide for registration of community domains and registers of common properties
within them, and in due course individual properties on a demand basis.
6. Communal Domain registers are established at local government level and simple procedures for
this disseminated. Final registration of Communal Domains takes place only after boundaries have
been finally agreed and the community land council is up and running. Registration of the council
as the lawful local land authority is part of the process.
7. Councils use simple land-use planning to divide domains into zones—for example, current farming
zones, potential investment zones, community pastures, and protected areas—and they devise
and put into effect any needed regulations for each zone.
8. Where restitution of wrongfully appropriated customary lands is constitutionally provided for,
community land councils are assisted to identify affected areas and to make those claims, seeking
direct restitution and/or compensation as appropriate. Where such lands are under lease or
licence to outsiders, rental income thereafter accrues to the council, with rigorous financial
accountability measures instituted as a prerequisite.
9. Formal identification and registration of common properties in the domain as the private group
owned property of all community members is encouraged where these remain vulnerable to
wrongful occupation or appropriation by Government agencies or others, including by local elites
or corrupt leaders. Registration of these conservation areas (e.g. Community Forest, Pasture or
River Reserves) may provide double protection.
45
10. Reworked and modernized community based regimes are put in place for resolving disputes
between and within communities, with appeal to higher levels.
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Situation of Land Rights in Apac District in Uganda and of Opportunities for Land Rights Protection
Work. Berkeley Trust, Uganda.
Adoko, J. & S. Devine, 2004. Land Matters in Displacement: The Importance of Land Rights in
Acholiland and What Threatens Them. CSOPNU.
Alden Wily, L. 2000a. Land Tenure Reform and the Balance of Power in Eastern and Southern
Africa. Natural Resources Perspectives. No. 58 ODI, London.
-----. 2000b. The democratization of Forest Management in Eastern and Southern Africa
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